What Zig felt like, coming from Rust(besok.github.io) |
What Zig felt like, coming from Rust(besok.github.io) |
I programmed in rust a bit and can't say I'm an expert, but in my view rust mostly-solved the memory management problem at compile time and without a GC, and it works very well. The biggest con and cost I've always seen repeated so far is that "it's slow to compile", and I get that, if you're past 250 crates the final --release link tends to become noticeable, but there were improvements to incremental compilation.
On the other hand - looking at the syntax from this post - Zig feels a blend of javascript, python and golang syntax that still requires memory management. So a nicer-written C that inherits all the issues from C? From the post: no functional programming, data mutation, memory leak, double-free, memory corruption.
Personally I'd rather trade a couple minutes of final link every time when this is the other option.
Kelley first created Zig when hr was working on a digital audio workstation and found most existing languages to be awkward for working with particularly hard real time requirements, but still wanted something more modern than C. Im speculating here, but I believe its advantage over Rust for that specific application is that you have tighter control over exactly when memory is allocated and deallocated, and how data is laid out in it. Rust wants to tie allocation lifetimes to scope in a very fine grained way that I would guess is beneficial the vast majority of the time, but does still make it harder to reason about when you’re about to stall out the CPU while the allocator does its thing.
Note that AT&T, where UNIX and C were born, the language they were researching as C replacement was Cyclone, not something that is not much different.
The code in that section is clear in its purpose and broad outline: "Give me a function and data; if the data is bare apply the function to it; if the data is a container apply the function to each item inside it."
You can absolutely do that with immutable data structures in Zig. You just have to pass an allocator to the function (i.e. instead of calling data.flat_map(f), you call data.flat_map(a, f) where a is your allocator).
That the Zig version of the code does mutation is a matter of programmer choice, not something imposed by the language.
(Also, what do monads have to do with it?)
> But the language quickly forces you to diverge from the functional style, mostly because you’re now dealing with allocators directly, and a genuinely pure functional approach means constantly constructing new structures. That’s either expensive in memory or expensive in the manual bookkeeping needed to avoid it.
So I don’t think he’s trying to say that it’s literally impossible. It felt more like the result of a good faith attempt to understand how Zig itself actually wants to be used, and to compare that to how he’s used to using Rust.
I actually liked that he did it. So many other comparisons want to evaluate one language against the other language’s values. But I don’t want to know how well Zig can do Rust; I want to know how well Zig accomplishes its own goals, and what those goals are.
All of the Handmade "C successor" languages seem to have this obsession, including not only Zig but Odin, C3 and Jai.
For some toy problems you can do clever allocator tricks and get a huge perf win. For example Jai and Odin both seem to really want you to write code which can throw away a "per-frame" arena periodically so they're not paying to track allocations in the arena because they're all thrown away at the same time.
But a lot of real world software just isn't that simple. This doesn't make such features worthless, it just means they're one of a thousand tools the experienced developer could want in their toolkit, not really deserving headline status.
The real problem is that people are using C for the wrong reasons. C is for the development of operating systems and low-level code, not applications.
Zig is more modern but anything that does even one iota more of hand-holding or has anything that looks like a guardrail fails the test.
If you want to write applications use Pascal, Java, C#, Swift or Go.
It's useful, but systems programming languages shouldn't be used to create applications in the first place. We're trying to solve a problem that shouldn't be solved. We're continuing and even confirming the usage of systems programming languages for application programming.
https://github.com/Syzygies/Compare
So you're in a restaurant where you don't speak the language, you can't read the menu, but you see three price points for set meals featuring the house specialty. (Say, "Crossing the Bridge" noodles in Yunnan.) Which do you choose? My tour guide, the author Fuchsia Dunlop, later agreed with me this is obvious: The middle choice.
So you're choosing between Go and C23 as candidate successors to K&R C. They both have "royal blood". One got the name. Knowing nothing more, which do you choose?
The answer is equally obvious. The one that got the name also got the warts.
For example, write in whatever language you know best, then translate to a more appropriate language using LLMs once the desired behavior can be checked automatically. It is a tactic that works in some cases.
Minimal rewrite due to the breaking changes introduced in C23 versus K&R C, while the others are a complete rewrite.
Even if the syntax is a bit of a kludge there are now ways to indicate bounds on function arguments.
I would have completely expected that.
1. Tooling (as an extension to the mentioned IDE support point). Zig and Rust are both praised for their tooling and I think rightfully so. The C/C++ interop story and the cross-compiling story in Zig are great. From the standpoint of a working practitioner though I think Rust is way ahead. Not surprising given that Zig is much younger, but something to keep in mind.
2. Compile Time Stuff: Here Zig is praised and Rust not so much. I think this is undeserved. Rust has much higher aspirations for their compile time features, namely that outcome must be identical regardless when the code runs. This is a very useful property but makes the task much harder and fundamentally incomparable with Zig comptime.
fn run_query(alloc) {
arena = init_arena(alloc);
defer arena.deinit();
}Now it all feels so pointless though. Like memorizing rules to do mental arithmetic. Sure, there is still use for language expertise, but not enough to get excited over new concepts and ideas.
As for me, I’d like to keep contributing to the ecosystem, and I will, whenever I come across a project worth building.”
Idk I don’t write either well enough to have a hand in this but losing out all of this for more Imperative stuff seems like a step back.
“ No functional paradigm
Rust is technically an imperative language, but it draws heavily on functional concepts: zero-cost iterators, lazy evaluation, ADTs, pattern matching, monadic types, traits, closures, and so on. Having also spent time with Haskell and Erlang, I’ve become fairly inclined toward the functional style, and it shows in this library. It leans heavily on FP idioms:
Monadic error control via combinators like Queryable and related types Monadic-style data types like Data<T> with map, flat_map, reduce, and friends Pure, immutable transformations Combinators over iterators instead of loops Closures for local abstraction Declarative macros as a small embedded DSL Sum types and product types”
https://gist.github.com/corporatepiyush/5382d79192be9737cf3b...
"Holds up"
"not a toy, but not a sprawling project either, and ideally.."
"And that’s the trap"
ctrl F "real" -> 6 usages
ctrl F "genuine" -> 4 usages
> Disclaimer: styling and error handling throughout this article were cleaned up with the help of AI.
The implication seems to be "light editing", but the LLM styling really comes through, so I guess that tracks.
In this case it feels AI generated with human polish, or vice versa. A couple tells are "One caveat worth stating up front..." and of course, "...the shape of the language itself...".
Is that what they said? If that's not what they said, why are you putting words in their mouth in an attempt to weaken their statement into some completely ridiculous stupid strawman that is obviously not actually what they said?
Allocators have been in wide use long before the 2020s but I agree there does seem to be a resurgent interest lately. Although I would argue it's part of a more broad trend of focusing data driven design. Which makes sense because accessing main memory is one of the slowest things your program can do.
They do, but not necessarily together with generic, standard containers.
When you find yourself wanting a nonstandard allocator, you usually want it because you want it to have some interesting property. It's not necessarily trivial to fit that into the interface of something like `std::vector`, or `std::unordered_map`, etc.
Here's my take as a game developer: 99% of use cases for custom allocators are scratch allocators for doing stuff within a frame. 95% of those are much easier to serve by just amortizing allocations by storing things in an `std::vector` (or equivalent) that gets cleared every frame. You can use linear storage to back many interesting data structures, including queues, ring buffers, priority queues, binary heaps, etc., and that's more than enough for a large number of systems in a game.
The overwhelming majority of the time, more complex data structures (like hash maps etc.) have a longer lifetime than the current frame, because the whole point of using them in the first place is to amortize lookup time across frames.
The important part is a language where the standard library isn't special, and Rust has this property, too. So in domains where things like per-frame allocators are useful, you can still have them. That capability just isn't cluttering up the more common path where that isn't useful.
this goes back decades, its not just a feature of the 2020s. as a systems programmer I always want this, and the idea that allocator state should be completely hidden and implicit is shortsighted.
but yes, it is a bit onerous to pass around allocator(s). the real complaint that I have is that if 'malloc' is global and a compiler primitive, then we can do things like coalesce allocations and have compiler managed lifetimes when appropriate.
explicit allocators are an important lever, its not clear to me that we could never find a way to make them possible without the minor downsides.
As far as I know this is not a concern for Zig comptime.
For one of my crates I needed to have a build script make a bunch of lookup tables as separate files for me to `include_bytes!` because at the time I couldn't generate a bunch of floating point conversions in const.
The biggest constraint today on Rust's constant evaluation compared to where you'd expect is that trait implementations can't ever be constant, this obviously means you can't call SomeTrait::function in your constant, even if you can see the implementation of SomeTrait::function and if it were not a trait it'd obviously be constant -- but it also means sugar like Rust's for loop, which de-sugars into trait invocations, can never be constant today.
I think we can expect that to get fixed in the relatively near future, but I'd have said that last year too so what do I know.
If you have C++ experience you'd probably want a lot more. C++ is allowed to allocate inside constant evaluation, and I believe in C++ 26 it's now even allowed to persist the allocation to runtime rather than being required to always clean up during compilation, so that's a much bigger set of crazy things you can do at compile time.
For years I used Rust as my hobby-programming language and loved it greatly. I never managed to land a job working with it full-time, because either the work was too niche or it didn't pay enough, or I was simply too comfortable where I was to change. And now that I finally have enough discretion over my technology choices to run a "proper" project using whatever tools and languages I want, it is not me but the AI that writes all of the code.
There's a part of me that feels a quite sad about all this. It's almost as if there actually all along existed a real final deadline on finding that "dream job". And I missed it. And while I expect this one miss to be just a small piece in the grand picture of things that we're going to lose or have already lost to the zeitgeist of agentic SWE, it feels big to me. It was my professional dream, while I still had professional dreams.
Let’s say I’m writing some concurrent code with an LLM. I’d probably feel much safer having it write Rust, rather than C. So even in a post-LLM world, languages will continue to evolve as long as abstractions can be improved.
First I thought you were going to comment about the grating LLM-isms in the article, which made me end up not enjoying reading it.
Programming and learning new things can still be fun in the era of agentic coding.
With LLMs, I get to quicky ask: what would this look like? Why do it that way? If you suspect that the LLM isn't doing it the right way, you can still investigate that yourself.
e.g. the other day, https://rhombus-lang.org/ was mentioned on HN. With LLMs, the cost for trying this out is practically much lower.
In 5-10 years, the people who have paid attention to these will be needed to bail us out of the mess that the rest of the slop-addled monke brains have created.
I prefer to prototype in Golang since it compiles fast and makes for quick iteration, but at the end I ask the LLM to port the Golang to Rust.
Nice Rust enums for APIs are the chef's kiss.
I absolutely will not write anything in Python or scripting languages anymore. They're too brittle and don't have great devex or deployment stories. Especially when you can just as easily build in a typesafe language with good error handling that compiles down to a single static binary.
I'm glad NVIDIA found a way to make GPUs programmable and got us out of the shaders tarpit, but did it have to be C++...
FWIW I've actually worked for 6 months on a large old Delphi project. It was some performance work that, as almost always, mainly required getting the language crap out of the way. In the end I got the job done (100x-1000x speedup) but I wouldn't want to switch back to this ecosystem: Licensing costs, weird language warts there too. A slow moving ecosystem. Ultimately, I just need something that does what I tell it to do, reliably and fast, and that doesn't get in the way.
Even hardware (GPUs) that functional language could trivially exploit, it’s still higher performance to write low level code and manages all the memory imperatively
I get why, and it makes it a better fit for its obvious “C++ reimagined, cleaner, and better” niche.
I just upgraded a less important service to Java 27, a few days after its release (several nice features). It's cool how easy it is to upgrade nowadays.
That an agent writes most of the code doesn't mean anything to me here.
My examples are Java because that is the main language where I work.
I would argue that "concepts" actually are more important than ever. Let's take my structured concurrency example. It doesn't matter here exactly what is, but if it ends up being as important as I think it will be, I likely want to write most concurrent code that way going forward.
However, it will likely be years until agents go to it unless deliberately steered in that direction. And if I want to make agents write it, I need to review it, and if I'm going to review, I need to understand it.
I think this is why I'm not pessimistic about the profession, it still feels like what I'm doing and learning matters.
Yep, that was my annoyance.
Const allocation is possible in Rust as an unstable feature. Not sure if you can persist it to runtime, though you can persist a reference which will become a static reference. I think it being unstable is why I needed `include_bytes!`.
I haven't used the relatively new C++17 polymorphic_allocator, though, maybe it fixes this.