Hacker News Reader

What advantages would there be with a native string type over []const u8. (For those not fluent in zig, a string is typed as a slice constant bytes, where a slice is a pointer + length)

View on HN

An UTF8 String would have invariant of always having valid UTF8, omitting need for further UTF8 validation.

If you're working on bytes string in Zig the status of them is unknown, so you have to always validate even if it's just Utf8. In Rust you can omit Utf8 validation for bytes from a String.

In Zig strings are assumed to be UTF8 unless documented otherwise, so any function operating on strings is not wasting CPU cycles doing any validation. The person who creates the string is expected to ensure it is valid UTF8 if needed.

This is the "Just don't write bugs" that we laugh at for C and C++.

If there is one thing Ada does better than Rust, is that it encodes the invariants in the type system.

While Rust doesn't goes as far as I would have want it's miles better than what Zig and C are doing - the programming equivalent of "Trust me bro!".

Constructing a runtime-invariant-checked utf8 string is not "omitting utf8 validation".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com