The bulk of the conversation happened in Discord around that time. Initial attempts to bring this up were met with "zig is perfect"-type conversation, none of which was very technical.
Finally, the conversation grew to be so large and fiery that Andrew had to step in and say "everyone play nice, now!" and then head back out.
Then this PR was filed. Invalid user input should not be classed as undefined behavior and concluding that the standard library's UTF decoder shouldn't be used if you want a safe execution is just absurd.
There were a few other run-ins on discord in the same vein. It made a few people at the time leave, including myself.
Andrew's smart. Zig is a cool idea. But I don't like when this laisse-faire attitude is taken when designing a programming language that places so much emphasis on being safe.
Only as safe as the creator decides. Andrew has shot down discussions about DOS vulnerabilities in the standard library and the cult-like discord community loves to dig on anyone who brings such things up.
I will be staying away from Zig exactly for that purpose. Great idea but I can't get behind a maintainer that adamantly refuses to even discuss proper, safe standard library design.
EDIT: Yep, the HN crowd tends to be the same. Downvote me all you want please :) We'll see over time.
Every time Zig is mentioned I always have to post a most-likely-downvoted warning:
The creator of Zig has expressed some disregard toward proper security in the current prototypes. The standard library is riddled with DOS vulnerabilities as of right now, and reports for them are closed as "The standard library will be rewritten." or the like.
I'm still miffed about Andrew's response to DOS vulnerabilities in the standard library. I know that Zig isn't at a v1 yet (or wasn't at the time, at least) but that's no excuse to shut down conversation about security.
I also don't like that the discord is run like a cult. If you say anything bad about Zig, you're berated until you ultimately have to leave. It's the Rust community all over again.
I don't see how those two things coincide at all. Further, your second statement is a strawman - for a project and community that touts being a serious replacement for C, there are indeed expectations about the security mindset of the individual providing the code. When the project has 7k+ stars on Github, clearly people are looking at it and using it. If the maintainer is being unsafe, it's ridiculous to imply nobody is allowed to be critical of that.
There is no excuse, in my opinion. The PR would have taken a step in a safer direction, even if the entirety of it is scrapped at a later date. It wouldn't have broken anything else in the codebase, and it was a completed, merge-able change.
Again, the frustration wasn't just from the PR alone - it was also the Discord flame war that ensued prior to the PR.
See my other comment. It's more the fact Andrew stepped into the conversation himself and just said "be nice" instead of addressing security concerns, just fueling the flame war even more.
A response to a security concern should never be "fuck off".
A regression appeared where members were accessible outside of their scopes even without the `pub` modifier. This took months to fix and the person bringing it up initially was yelled at about not understanding programming languages in the discord channel.
Another one I personally brought up was that the standard library's utf-8 module had a decoder that panics on invalid input sequences, certainly setting consumers up for DOS attacks with malformed utf-8 inputs. EDIT: DOS vulnerability is still there (https://github.com/ziglang/zig/blob/master/lib/std/unicode.z..., PR to fix that was closed https://github.com/ziglang/zig/pull/4929). I never responded to the PR because it was at that moment I decided to abandon Zig altogether.
The response to the latter was pretty much "the standard library isn't meant to be used right now", to which I really don't have a response. There was a very, very long and heated argument in the discord channel about it where instead of addressing the concerns about DOS and security I was instead insulted for apparently trying to taint an otherwise perfect language.
The community is vile and the few examples I've seen of the maintainer disregarding safety and security in this way don't give me any amount of confidence in the project overall.
EDIT: Worth mentioning, the syntax and semantics surrounding Zig are not new ideas. I'm sure another project will pop up at some point to compete; many discussions I've seen in the language design channels on IRC and a few discord servers have many people arriving at similar conclusions Zig has made, without knowing Zig even exists. I think we're slowly converging on a language that looks a lot like Zig, but I don't think Zig will be its ultimate incarnation.
Zig has very little focus on safety and has had several regressions related to security and correctness, most of which Andrew has said he doesn't care about as much. This concerns me greatly.
The discord community operates like a cult (sound familiar, Rust community?) and any criticisms or anything not exuberantly positive results in a flame war.
I saw all of that happen several times so far with the community and it's ultimately what drove me away from the project altogether.
> his top priority is managing complexity and limiting surprise
Zig doesn't do either of those things. There are a fair amount of criticisms of the mental model of the author that I've seen voiced - some including security.
What's worse, the community surrounding Zig (in particular, the Discord community) operates more like a cult - any negative questioning gets you shunned.
I was personally a huge fan of Zig until a number of questionable design decisions and dismissed bug reports lead me to believe it will forever remain a toy language. I can't imagine Dijkstra approving.
The bulk of the conversation happened in Discord around that time. Initial attempts to bring this up were met with "zig is perfect"-type conversation, none of which was very technical.
Finally, the conversation grew to be so large and fiery that Andrew had to step in and say "everyone play nice, now!" and then head back out.
Then this PR was filed. Invalid user input should not be classed as undefined behavior and concluding that the standard library's UTF decoder shouldn't be used if you want a safe execution is just absurd.
There were a few other run-ins on discord in the same vein. It made a few people at the time leave, including myself.
Andrew's smart. Zig is a cool idea. But I don't like when this laisse-faire attitude is taken when designing a programming language that places so much emphasis on being safe.