Hacker News Reader

Comment by xyproto | Hacker News Reader

If you have a command line application, you probably either want to use a library that provides colors and more features, or output to file (where writing to stdout is more appropriate than "print").

When developing, "print" is more commonly used as an aid for the developer. Most "print" messages should either be removed or outsourced to a library when the program nears completion. "warn" fills a similar purpose as "print".

If you really want "print", a small function that writes to stdout is quick to write.

View on HN

If I'm writing a command line application then, most of the time, I just want to let the user know what's going on. It doesn't always have to be fancy and I don't want to track down a third party library to tell the user all went well and give basic statistics. I'd go ballistic if I had to download a library to print out "35 records processed." It just doesn't make sense.

Then use std.debug.warn?

Quoting the docs linked above:

> Usually you don't want to write to stdout. You want to write to stderr. And you don't care if it fails. It's more like a warning message that you want to emit. For that you can use a simpler API:

    const warn = @import("std").debug.warn;
    
    pub fn main() void {
        warn("Hello, world!\n");
    }

The message "35 records processed" isn't a warning, nor should it necessarily go to stderr.

Tools following the UNIX philosophy pride themselves on only bothering the user with output messages when something goes wrong.

You can still write that message to strout, there just isn't a brief "print" function.

No, if I have a command line application, I probably want to write (possibly formatted) output to stdout -- very likely without colors or other features.

A while ago, I tried to figure how how to do the equivalent of C's

    int n = 42;
    printf("n = %d\n", n);

I was unable to find a straightforward way to do that. (Formatted output to stderr, on the other hand, is easy.) I submitted a bug report and haven't gotten a response.

https://github.com/ziglang/www.ziglang.org/issues/15

warn() is just as complex to write as print(). One is included, the other isn't.

If you classify all C-programs by what output they use (multiple counts allowed), printf/puts shows up with the highest percentage long before ncurses, X or anything else.

What's not included is an easy way to ignore errors when writing to stdout. If that's your complaint, then Zig is not the language for you. Zig also doesn't provide an easy way to ignore allocation failure errors, for example. Edge cases matter. There's no excuse for failing to handle errors.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com