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Comment by bodge5000 | Hacker News Reader

I'm no expert on either languages, but I tried Zig for the first time properly the other day. I really liked it up until I hit hashmaps. One thing that I think goes under-appreciated about C (and other languages with a similar paradigm) is thats its pretty upfront and clear about what it can and can't do out of the box. If you want hashmaps in C, you need to create your own implementation, otherwise think of a way round them. In Zig meanwhile, they exist in the standard library, but at least for me, were more work than they were worth to work with. The result was the same, when making my test project in both C and Zig I ended up not using hashmaps, the difference is that in C I came to this decision in 2 minutes rather than 2 hours.

I imagine if I had more experience in Zig, none of that would be a problem, and its not aiming to be a beginner-friendly language anyway, but that was just my experience of it so far

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As counter point, the way that Zig implements hash maps is absolutely instrumental for TigerBeetle.

Zig hashmaps _are_ quite a bit more cumbersome than, eg, in Rust --- you need to decided whether you want the allocator to be bundled with the hasmap, and its also up to the user of the hash map to provide equality and hash code (and, of course, there's manual defer instead of RAII).

However, this flexibility and verbosity comes with a super-power --- you can pass an allocator to a hash map at creation time, and then _not_ pass an allocator when you actually use the hash map. This is huge. This means that we get compile-time guarantee that we follow rule 3 of NASA's 10 rules

    3. Do not use dynamic memory allocation after initialization.

And we _still_ can enjoy using a hashmap from the standard library! No other language I know has an equivalent tool.

You can achieve the same thing in Rust or any other language that offers some sort of field privacy (which Zig doesn't btw) by wrapping the hash map with your own type and exposing the interface you want.

Not quite std, but Rust's heapless lib let's you use a statically-allocated Hashmap. The distinction is its max size is declared on construction.

That's not quite it: with heapless, memory is fully static, the size of hash map is a compile-time parameter, which is a part of HashMap's type.

In Zig, the map could be initialized and sized at runtime, but you still can enforce, statically, that it doesn't do any allocations after that.

In both nightly Rust and Zig, heapless version can be expressed by passing a fixed-buffer-backed allocator to the standard hash map.

I don't quite understand how do you change the size of a zig hashmap in runtime by, for example, inserting 1M items at some point but at the same time being able to enforce in compile-time that such operation will not result with dynamic allocation?

Compare these two methods:

https://github.com/ziglang/zig/blob/0dffab7356685c7643aa6e3c...

One of them requires passing an allocator (and can allocate), the other doesn’t have an allocator argument (and thus can’t allocate). If you only pass allocator to `init` method of your application, and don’t store it anywhere, only init will be able to call allocating methods, the rest of the app will be allocation free, by construction.

If the second one can't allocate then how does it handle the case where you don't have enough capacity to insert the new (k,v) pair?

I can see that the difference between the two is in self.growIfNeeded() call, https://github.com/ziglang/zig/blob/0dffab7356685c7643aa6e3c..., which the one that doesn't allocate really doesn't have. Does it assume that the predefined capacity will not be reached?

> Does it assume that the predefined capacity will not be reached?

Yes, the function name says exactly that as well, though admittedly what this actually means and what consequences it might have if the assumption is false are probably fairly opaque to a novice user.

> how does it handle the case where you don't have enough capacity to insert the new (k,v) pair?

Breaking the invariant results in safety-checked undefined behavior, that's what the "asserts" in the doc comment signifies[0]. Basically, if something goes awry at runtime you'll get a crash along with a nice error trace in Debug/ReleaseSafe mode or with the appropriate @setRuntimeSafety call.

If instead you'd like to have errors that you can handle, you could use your real allocator where you expect to actually use it and pass a failing allocator[1] everywhere else (but that's sort of abusing the API IMO, I don't know if I'd actually recommend you do this).

[0] https://ziglang.org/documentation/master/#Doc-Comment-Guidan...

[1] https://github.com/ziglang/zig/blob/0dffab7356685c7643aa6e3c...

Right, that's what I thought is happening under the hood. Thanks for confirming.

This also means that there is nothing novel about this approach that cannot be achieved in other programming languages as one of the parent comments claimed.

This is simply a hashmap with pre-allocated pool of memory.

I don't know, but you could avoid resizing the hashmap and allow the collisions but then your buckets would still need resizing

The hash map I'm used to in C uses intrusive lists so it's pretty much allocation free. Would they fit the bill?

"Pretty much" is great in most contexts, but in this one I think GP is pretty darn strict about having absolutely zero dynamic allocations

By "pretty much", I meant that the bucket lists are already allocation free thanks to intrusive lists; of course the hash table itself can uses allocation when it's resized, or not, depending on user choice. It's trivial to preallocate it or use an arena or whatever, since it's just a flat array.

> No other language I know has an equivalent tool.

I completely agree: this has been my experience as well.

I can't remember having any issues with using hash maps in Zig when I tried it out during Advent of Code. They were almost as easy to use in Zig as in Rust. Only extra complication was returning error on failed allocation rather than panicking.

Would you mind elaborating on the complications you ran into? I ask because I think you used std.HashMap instead of std.AutoHashMap, the latter of which automatically chooses a hash function based on the types provided.

It was a little over a week ago now so my memory is a bit hazy, but I'll try to the best of my knowledge.

Without getting into the weeds of why (happy to do so, just want to keep this readable), basically I needed to define and populate a hashmap in a new script and then import it into my main script, which to my mind left me with two options:

* Define and initialise it at the same time (my preferred method) as a constant. I don't have much to say on this as iirc, I had no luck with it at all, never even got close.

* Define it in a (public) function, add each field in with "put" and then return the hashmap. I tried with std.AutoHashMap and various other things, but to what I could work out there was no type of hashmap, so it wouldn't accept my return type.

I think for the first point you wanted a block that evaluated to the map, unsure if that’s what you wanted though

I think so, if I write it out in pseudo code it might make more sense. What I was trying to do was pretty much:

    const mymap = {1: "hello", 2: "world"};

But the only thing I could find any answers for was something more like:

    const mymap; mymap.put(1, "hello"); mymap.put(2, "world");

Here's how you return a hashmap from a function:

  fn buildMap(allocator: std.mem.Allocator) !std.AutoHashMap(u64, u64) {
      var result = std.AutoHashMap(u64, u64).init(allocator);
      errdefer result.deinit();
      try result.put(10, 100);
      try result.put(20, 200);
      return result;
  }

Your #1 option should be possible once Zig has comptime allocators -- it's on the roadmap, but not possible yet iirc.

If I remember correctly I tried almost exactly that, I think it was just the bang operator I missed out (obviously essential in this case).

Cheers for letting me know though!

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