Hacker News Reader

Is the comment about zig correct about its typing? It's certainly true about its compilation, but that's not the same thing. Also, if you're going to have a turing-complete compile time, you might as well have it in something that looks like a programming language, since that will fit your debugging mental model.

View on HN

Since you can pass types to compile-time functions, yes that is correct. Take the example [from the 0.6.0 documentation](https://ziglang.org/documentation/0.6.0/#comptime) for example: At compile time the compiler has to figure out whether to type the `max` function using `u32` or `f64`. Since you can make the boolean condition arbitrarily complex the _type_ of max function called is undecidable in general.

I'm not arguing for or against undecidability in type systems, the page aims to be present the information neutrally.

Sorry, I wasn't defensive about the decidability of the type system, just curious about the analysis, which squares with my understanding of zig now! Thanks for the clarification; it might be helpful to expand on that in the doc.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com