I can't figure out why i am supposed to care about zig beyond it's fun? I get that it's interesting and more safe than C (honestly though what the hell isn 't).
Say you write rust pretty regularly for new product development, what does zig offer to make my life better, my products more stable, etc?
- The small footprint in Zig enables fast compilation (and getting faster) and fast feedback cycles.
- Arbitrary nastiness can happen using From and other traits in Rust, and the tendency to shadow names and rely on type inference can make that unpleasant to track down. In Zig you'd be forced to make a choice (for any non-trivial type) at the return or call site of how you were going to convert things.
- If you want to use the stdlib and have any non-trivial control over how objects are allocated you're in for a rough time in Rust (say, a circular buffer backing some objects and a reusable arena for others). You'll probably be reinventing a lot of wheels.
- Similarly with issues like implicit locking in stdout. It's executing a syscall per line anyway, but the lock can inadvertently make contended writes 1000x slower, so suddenly logging in multithreaded code needs a dedicated logger, and not any of the common options since those fall back to the locking stdout we're trying to avoid.
The language was not small whatsoever at the time. It was not fun.
It may not be the smallest language, but, it compiles pretty tightly.
Rust can provide some guarantees but it still won't protect you from logic errors or a "clever" coworker. In comparison, zig is simple and at the end of the day readability is my best defense against bugs/errors.
There was an interesting comparison (and discussion) of zig vs rust safety a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26537693
I find myself agreeing with pron and others in that discussion when they say no one really wants to use a safe language. What they want are correct programs.
What remains to be seen is how easy it is to write correct programs in each and the values people place on the deltas between the two languages.
This isn't really consistent with my experience. Compared to writing other languages with varying levels of strictness (C, Python, Go to name a few), Rust's compiler saves me a lot of time writing tests and finding bugs.
It doesn't save me the work of fixing them, but in my experience, bugs that are hard to find and easy to fix drastically outnumber bugs that are easy to find and hard to fix.
That said, I haven't tried Zig. It's on my radar, but just haven't had a new project to start lately.
Once I started realizing what the borrow checker was saying it wasn't "fighting the compiler" I realized what I was asking the compiler to do was really not a good idea. It becomes your friend basically.
I didn't make this post to shill rust, I'm pretty language agnostic to my own detriment... The point is, it's worth considering and trying it again if you didn't get it the first time around. Rust took me 2x to become a tool I'd use, I honestly hated it at first.
I like rust (I actually liked it from the start years ago). However, I believe that there are tradeoffs and the companies you named use other languages in addition to rust because they also believe there are tradeoffs.
Rust won't be the last language. I don't want to get too comfortable with what I know and miss out on what I don't. I am excited by new languages that may also have something to offer. However, I can't master them all so a good discussion is valuable and can offer shortcuts through the noise. I think my assumption in my first reply to your original post was that you were interested in the same thing. However, if you are happy with rust then I don't want to spoil your enjoyment.
While you can technically use Rust in these domains you'll find yourself jumping through hoops and fighting against quirks that come with it being fairly high-level and very opinionated on how to enforce memory safety.
One such scenario I've encountered is implementing my own memcpy with a loop like `for i in 0..len`. This works in release builds, but without optimisations this gets a deeeeep callstack that eventually also calls memcpy, so you get a stack overflow. Note how memcpy is implemented in rlibc to avoid this issue: https://docs.rs/rlibc/latest/src/rlibc/lib.rs.html#30-38
It's funny how in rust you can write raw asm, but there seem to be quirks somewhere in the middle.
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Why Zig When There is Already C++, D, and Rust?
- No hidden control flow. If Zig code doesn’t look like it’s jumping away to call a function, then it isn’t.
- No hidden allocations. Zig has a hands-off approach when it comes to heap allocation. There is no new keyword or any other language feature that uses a heap allocator. The entire concept of the heap is managed by library and application code, not by the language.
- First-class support for no standard library. Zig has an entirely optional standard library. Each std lib API only gets compiled into your program if you use it. Zig has equal support for either linking against libc or not linking against it. Zig is friendly to bare-metal and high-performance development.
- A Portable Language for Libraries. Zig is attempting to become the new portable language for libraries by simultaneously making it straightforward to conform to the C ABI for external functions, and introducing safety and language design that prevents common bugs within the implementations.
- A Package Manager and Build System for Existing Projects. Not only can you write Zig code instead of C or C++ code, but you can use Zig as a replacement for autotools, cmake, make, scons, ninja, etc. And on top of this, it (will) provide a package manager for native dependencies. This build system is intended to be appropriate even if the entirety of a project’s codebase is in C or C++.
- Simplicity. Zig has no macros and no metaprogramming, yet is still powerful enough to express complex programs in a clear, non-repetitive way. Even Rust has macros with special cases like format!, which is implemented in the compiler itself. Meanwhile in Zig, the equivalent function is implemented in the standard library with no special case code in the compiler.
- Tooling. Zig provides binary archives for Linux, Windows, macOS and FreeBSD. It is installed by downloading and extracting a single archive, no system configuration needed. It is statically compiled, uses LLVM, has out of the box cross-compilation to most major platforms, and ships w/ libc source and dynamically compiles when needed. The Zig build system has caching and compiles C and C++ code with libc support
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To me it comes down to Zig is a "modern" C, but unlike most other attempts at replacing C it doesn't skip some of C's use cases.
This one is an odd point; this very article is a demonstration of metaprogramming*:
> Thanks to Zig’s type reflection we can read a row of data into a user-provided type without needing to write any “mapping” function: we know the type we want to read (here the User struct) and can analyse it at compile-time.
* Which is a feature I favor, for the record.
In all honesty, I prefer the syntax of D over all the others, it feels the most like Java or C# but with a lot of modern benefits. D is trying to do too much though it feels like and I would love for the next D standard library to support OOTB similar to what Go supports, especially a very minimalist web server, I think all modern programming languages should be capable of spinning up web servers out of the box. This is one small detail Go got right in my opinion.
Here's an article from the Chromium team on challenges they faced with trying to integrate Rust (or at least evaluating it) note the entry was last updated in 2020:
https://www.chromium.org/Home/chromium-security/memory-safet...
(To be fair, I think Python and Ruby have HTTP servers in their standard libraries as well, at least minimalist ones.)
At the other extreme, if you're writing an operating system or a language VM, you probably want contextual allocators (like an allocator that takes a runtime argument like "which green thread I'm allocating on") which rust makes extremely difficult.
If you really need memory and resource safety I think the best answer is to be patient. Zig is very easy to parse and I imagine it will be the case that static analysis build tools will come about which can do what you want out of rust.... Being decoupled from the compiler chain you would be able to run fast but guard your prs to main/dev/release (as you see fit) with static analysis tools that will protect you with the safety you seek in an isomorphic fashion to "how rust does it". There's no reason why someone couldn't write it now, but with a lot of things (like ZIR/AIR) being highly unstable -- and these are what you're likely to want to statically analyze for such a tool -- for ones sanity I don't recommend building out a tool like that now.
Also it's not like that safety costs much of anything. You really can get comfortable writing rust, especially "easy rust" like a single thread cli app. It really is easy, even convenient.
Either zig is a different tool to rust, in which case I get it. Or people should be waiting for zig to be mature, meanwhile rust has been stable for half a decade, and at this point "just works". I'm not going to sit through an addendum static analyzer and all the bugs that come with making one for a few years. Other people whose appetite for risk is higher will though, and I wish them the best. I've seen efforts in other languages, my conclusion is that it's much better to have it built in...
- I use zig as my build system for both rust, zig, C libraries and linking since the build system works really well for this purpose
- When I need to write applications or libraries that can benefit from compile-time code, I always try and use zigs since it's much easier to use comptime then a combination of rust macros and generics
- I like the zig async story a lot better. Or at least it's much easier to wrap my head around and write code in compared to rust + tokyo
On the other hand, sometimes I know a project will benefit from the borrow checker or I want to use some of the awesome rust crates that the community made and I'll use rust instead.
Agree, Tokio is a little tricky for people new to rust no doubt, but it's tricky for a reason. It's saving lives in production.
(The way to manage memory in C++ and C is to opt in to a memory management pattern... hopefully you've chosen a good pattern and hopefully you follow it consistently. Patterns are generally backed by utilities and primitives that are hopefully correct, complete, and hopefully make it relatively easy to follow the pattern consistently. Hopefully you can get a linter to help you too. In a sense Rust takes the same approach, but was implemented from the ground up to eliminate all the gaps so you essentially don't have to hope to successfully bridge the gaps yourself.)