Two different philosophical approaches with Zig and Rust.
- Zig: Let's have a simple language with as few footguns as possible and make good code easy to write. However we value explicitness and allow the developer to do anything they need to do. C interoperability is a primary feature that is always available. We have run time checks for as many areas of undetermined behaviour as we can.
- Rust: let's make the compiler the guardian of what is safe to do. Unless the developer hits the escape hatch, we will disallow behaviour to keep the developer safe. To allow the compiler to reason about safety we will have an intricate type system which will contain concepts like lifetimes and data mobility. This will get complex sometimes so we will have a macro system to hide that complexity.
Zig is a lot simpler than Rust, but I think it asks more of it's developer.
Clock rate isn't the only factor. A design can be power hungry at a low clock rate if designed badly, and if it it is... you're never getting that think running fast.
All of those things are solved with modern extensions. It's like comparing pre-MMX x86 code with modern x86. Misaligned loads and stores are Zicclsm, bit manipulation is Zb[abcs], atomic memory operations are made mandatory in Ziccamoa.
All of these extensions are mandatory in the RVA22 and RVA23 profiles and so will be implemented on any up to date RISC-V core. It's definitely worth setting your compiler target appropriately before making comparisons.
Given that Mandarin has many forms of "yes", isn't the problem that all those forms map on to our singular "yes". For a native speaker "yeeeessss" means something very different to "yes", but they would use a different word.
Knowing which is being spoken or heard is going to be hard.
> Question: Did photoshop kill photography? Because honestly, this AI discussion to me sounds very much like the discussion back then.
It killed an aspect of it. The film processing in the darkroom. Even before digital cameras were ubiquitous it was standard to get a scan before doing any processing digitally. Chemical processing was reduced the minimum necessary.
My biggest complaint is there's no way to name a signal because a wire isn't a thing. You instance gates and give those names, but wires are anonymous connections between gate pins.
I think this is backwards. Knowing that a signal is the clock, reset, data valid, adder result is far more important than the gate that drove it. The gates barely need names. Sadly, I think starting with that concept leads to a rather different language.
As Blair got most institutionalised to the world of politics he became more and more authoritarian. Starmer appears to be listening to Blair who is now even worse than he was as PM.
Labour generally has a "paternalistic authoritarianism" to they way they govern, but this is dialed to 11.
> "We don't need destructors, defer/errdefer is enough" is Zig's stance, and it was mostly OK.
There's more than that. Zig has leak detecting memory allocators as well, but they only detect the leak if it happens. Nobody had a reliable reproduction method until recently.
A 50-ish MB build time dependency that doesn't need any special privileges or installation to run? That's over engineering? A binary release of just CMake is bigger than all of Zig.
There's one area I wish we did differently which I think is a hang-over from big-endian. It's the order of bytes when we write out hex dumps of memory.
> - we have authentication everywhere in our stack, so I've started including the user id on every log line. This makes getting a holistic view of what a user experienced much easier.
Depends on the service, but tracking everything a user does may not be an option in terms of data retention laws
> Zig, for all its ergonomic benefits, doesn’t make memory management safe like Rust does.
Not like Rust does, no, but that's the point. It brings both non-nullable pointers and bounded pointers (slices). They solve a lot of problem by themselves. Tracking allocations is still a manual process, but with `defer` semantics there are many fewer foot guns.
> I kind of doubt the Linux maintainers would want to introduce a third language to the codebase.
The jump from 2 to 3 is smaller than the jump from 1 to 2, but I generally agree.
It is intended for release builds. The ReleaseSafe target will keep the checks. ReleaseFast and ReleaseSmall will remove the checks, but those aren't the recommended release modes for general software. Only for when performance or size are critical.
- Zig: Let's have a simple language with as few footguns as possible and make good code easy to write. However we value explicitness and allow the developer to do anything they need to do. C interoperability is a primary feature that is always available. We have run time checks for as many areas of undetermined behaviour as we can.
- Rust: let's make the compiler the guardian of what is safe to do. Unless the developer hits the escape hatch, we will disallow behaviour to keep the developer safe. To allow the compiler to reason about safety we will have an intricate type system which will contain concepts like lifetimes and data mobility. This will get complex sometimes so we will have a macro system to hide that complexity.
Zig is a lot simpler than Rust, but I think it asks more of it's developer.