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Comment by jay-barronville | Hacker News Reader

While I understand the reasoning, I think this is one of the most disappointing decisions by the Zig team.

One of the main reasons I took Zig seriously was their C interop story—as someone who loves C and dislikes almost every implementation of C interop and FFI I’ve used in other languages (Rust is a notable exception to this), I was pretty much sold on Zig when I was able to, in a total of < 3-ish hours, (1) implement a complete Zig wrapper over a C library I wrote without introducing any overhead, (2) build a Zig program using the wrapper, and (3) cross-compile the program, statically, producing single binaries for 5 different targets…Linux (amd64, arm64), macOS (amd64, arm64), and Windows (amd64), ALL from one laptop using a single Zig executable and some simple flags. This was C interop and productivity I’ve never experienced before.

I respect Andrew a lot (I think he’s pretty brilliant), so I hope this turns out to not be as bad as I think it’ll be for those of us who love Zig for what brings to the table for programmers who are biased toward C.

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See these posts on the LLVM issue by Andrew. They clearly state that this functionality isn't going anywhere, just the method of achieving said functionality is changing:

https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/16270#issuecomment-161... https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/16270#issuecomment-161...

Not involved with Zig at all, but this comment is a bit concerning :

> This is not the first controversial change I have made to the Zig project, and it won't be the last. I have a vision, and I know how to execute it. People are often surprised by what Zig has accomplished, and they wonder why other projects have not done what Zig does. Well, you are seeing the magic right now. I ignore the peanut gallery and do what I know is right, while taking care of my users' needs at the same time. If you don't understand now, you will understand once this plan unfolds. By that time it will seem obvious in hindsight.

He's probably brillant and all but this ... feels like hubris.

Reading that comment for the first time just now, and I love that. More power to them.

Or very high confidence backed up by experience and skill, expressed through an honest personality.

In a world of humble bragging and cheap talk, I find it refreshing.

Don Quixote or St. George? Only time will tell. Meanwhile the code works.

Wow, that actually makes me want to look into zig a lot more. so many projects, rust included, get bogged down in design by committee and half baked decisions that please no one.

Agreed. Andrew Kelley's ability to have, communicate and maintain a clear and consistent vision is one of the most refreshing things about Zig. I don't actually use it, but this might actually be the main thing attracting me to it.

Plenty has already been said about design-by-committee and relying overmuch on user feedback, but one thing that doesn't get mentioned as often is that this approach tends to transform additive bias[1] from a cognitive bias into an iron law. Once you let that happen, you're on a relatively short and slippery slope to having a kitchen sink language. And one refreshing thing about Zig is that's it's clearly working very hard at not becoming a kitchen sink language. I'm not sure I can say the same about most other newer systems programming languages.

That doesn't mean having a BDFL is all kittens and rainbows, and I'm sure Andrew has made plenty of mistakes. But I've also never seen any indication that he's acted out of anything other than good faith. That last paragraph is possibly the closest I've ever seen to him saying something arrogant, and I see it as the exception that proves the rule. Finding such a tactful way to remind people that this is a BDFL project and he's the BDFL could not have been easy, and I imagine he put a lot of care into crafting that paragraph.

1: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/our-brain-typical...

I agree that letting the community completely dictate direction is a bad idea, but so too is being so dogmatic and idealist that you ignore the feedback.

Rust definitely swayed more to the former than I'd have liked, but you also have Go as a counterexample where generics were dismissed for a decade+ in response to user feedback and then kind of :shrug: ok fine we'll add generics.

I simultaneously understand why that comment gives you pause, and find comfort in seeing such a clear expression of vision.

As someone who often thinks several steps ahead about where I want to take a project, I find it’s just as often difficult to communicate that vision at the level of detail necessary to establish a shared understanding of what those steps mean, and how various apparent minutiae come together to make them all valuable together.

I would be lying if I said I don’t wish I shared this particular hubris, and the corresponding expectation that execution will be sufficient to bolster any trust challenged along the way.

> He's probably brillant and all but this ... feels like hubris.

I don’t think it’s hubris, because Andrew’s results speak for him, but it’s certainly alienating, to be honest.

Although I understand the struggle of having to prioritize opinions and perspectives, it comes across like Andrew only values the opinions and perspectives of very specific folks, whom he often calls out.

Here’s what I mean: I love Zig and I write a lot of Zig code, especially within the past year (almost daily), but none of the Zig code I’ve been working on is publicly available or open-source (although I hope I can open-source various components soon, fingers crossed). I’ve gained a lot of valuable experience with Zig—including successfully convincing folks (mainly C programmers) to use it who wouldn’t have tried it otherwise. When I read these interactions, even though I have thoughts I’d like to share as a committed user who wants to see the project succeed and gain mainstream adoption, I get the feeling that my thoughts aren’t welcome since I don’t have a huge Zig project or something, so I just keep my thoughts to myself. Andrew seems to mostly care about feedback from the creators of Bun, TigerBeetle, etc., which, if I’m correct, is fine (it’s his project and therefore his right), but I imagine there are plenty of users like me who aren’t just part of “the peanut gallery” yet staying out of it to avoid the drama.

This type of stance is what de-popularized the Elm language.

Don't get me wrong - I wish the best for both languages and am thoroughly impressed by the work of their creators. I can see that it must be a hard thing to balance.

Sounds like damage control. I have to say, for a brilliant guy, andrewrk knows nothing about marketing. The fact that the Zig project can make this significant of a change to their core-value because "trust me i know what I'm doing", makes it impossible (for now) to rely on this in any type of a widely-deployed Enterprise setting. This just made the highly risky move of moving to Zig make it darn near impossible.

What he should have done is announce a project at the same time that will maintain the current developer experience, even if that project is not part of the zig foundation. The developer doesn't care about how he builds zig. They want 1) download 2) use. It doesn't matter from where. If today it's directly from zig, and tomorrow it's from elsewhere to download a combined package, that 's all the devs needed to hear.

Wait what is controversial here? Removing llvm as a dependency and making it a (probably default available) plugin instead? Seems "obviously good", if you ask me.

Weird machinations around projects that are and aren't (but are privileged because he's the creator) part of the zig foundation would be more concerning, quite frankly.

Unfortunately there's a lot of people on the internet who haven't even used Zig nor plan to use it anytime in the future and who just enjoy to create drama by amplifying any decision with a hint of controversy around it (also see the 'unused variables are errors' drama which turned out to be a non-issue after it was actually implemented).

Unrelated to Zig, it's the exact same thing with "WASM can't access the DOM" btw, comes up everytime when WASM is in the news, but is a complete non-issue in practice for anybody actually using WASM, and I'm sure each popular software project has at least one such 'drama issues'.

The 'LLVM divorce' has been announced waaaay ahead (maybe years) of any actual steps to make that happen, for a language ecosystem that's still unstable anyway, and with the promise that a solution will be in place before LLVM is actually kicked out.

Not sure what else could have been done better, and as other have said, this sort of decision making process is much preferable to a committee approach.

The LLVM divorce has also gotten criticism since it first was announced and we have so far not seen any complete solution. Maybe we will land in one but if people did not voice their concerns there is no reason to think such a solution would be found.

What is there to criticize though? What "solution" is necessary?

LLVM is not and was never going away as a compiler backend, it will just not be the default one and you will be able to compile zig without it (though in practice everyone will for prod releases)

The fact that WASM requires a JS is a marketing fail and misses what could have been a marketing opportunity to make the claim, "finally an alternative to JavaScript".

In this case, this is not a non-issue. If you look at the original github issue, it does a lot of damage, followed by a lot of confusion, followed by a damage-control post that shouldn't have been required if it the original issue was written with more care. It wasn't, because the marketing aspect of Zig was not the focus -- the technical issue was. So it blew up. Hopefully it'll be a lesson learned, but I suspect it isn't. It will take 20 more of such incidents before it sinks in.

As far as it was "announced years ago", I don't see how that matters. The people who are seeing the issue now, and this discussion weren't there to see the announcement years ago.

But I do understand what you're saying. You're point is that the onus is on the the reader to the do their research before overreacting. That's a perfectly fine position. I have a counter opinion which is that the person making the statement / claim / annoucement, simply be understanding of the implication of their statements.

This thing blowing up should not have been a surprise to anyone. Sounds like it would have been to you, so the fact that it blew up is evidence that you would have misjudged. Unless you also agree that the initial message should could have been better worded, in which case, what exactly are you disagreeing with?

You have to admit that "divorce" was not really a good metaphor, though it did get eyes on the drama.

Zig's not at version 1.0.0 yet. Yes, it would be very irresponsible to use current-day Zig in a widely-deployed Enterprise setting. The release notes explicitly acknowledge Zig is currently immature, and is currently only suited to people willing to participate in the language development process.

> as someone who loves C and dislikes almost every implementation of C interop and FFI I’ve used in other languages (Rust is a notable exception to this),

Have you tried D? It can import C files as if they were D modules: https://dlang.org/spec/importc.html

Basically, if there's a `hello.c` file next to your D file, you simply import it with:

    import hello

And use the functions it provides. You can also import only a subset of it, of course:

    import hello: square;

Or rename the import:

    import hi = hello;

The C stdlib is exposed by D's stdlib as if it were a D library: https://dlang.org/phobos/core_stdc_assert_.html

C libraries (header files) can be compiled to D and then used as D modules as well, see https://github.com/jacob-carlborg/dstep

Is that as good as Rust?

> Have you tried D?

I tried D years ago (at least 5 years ago, I think), but I don’t remember experimenting with the C interop.

Your explanation sounds intriguing though. And a couple pretty smart folks I respect have talked about D too. So thanks for bringing it up. I’m going to make some time to experiment with it again some time soon.

> Is that as good as Rust?

Franky, although I don’t have firsthand experience with D, your explanation and example make the D C interop experience sound actually better than Rust’s. It seems more similar to Zig.

I think the feature that allows importing c, called "importC", is newer than 5 years. I think they may have "copied" it from Zig :D they definitely are trying to not "fall behind" Zig and keep making the language better. With DMD, you can cross compile just as with Zig, but only to object files as the linker is not multi-platform... so I am experimenting with using Zig's linker to "finish" the job. Unfortunately, Zig is not being able to link Phobos, the D stdlib, for reasons I don't understand yet.

This sounds amazing, and it's great that tooling is so strong of some "new kids on the block" (Zig, Rust), even better than C.

With hindsight, it is strange that the C community, with all the people and money behind it (and what scale!) never even managed to build a proper packaging manager (okay, there's now Conan, but that came from Python guys).

But then, there even still isn't a perfect C string library around (something that would combine GLib, SDS, ICU, say, and then standardize it in C2038).

[1] Hanson's C: Interfaces & Implementations (CII) - Str: https://cii.s3.amazonaws.com/book/pdf/quickref.pdf

[2] ICU - https://icu.unicode.org

[3] SDS - https://github.com/antirez/sds

[4] GLib - https://docs.gtk.org/glib/struct.String.html

The interesting thing is that the Zig build system could be implemented in a C/C++ compiler without any language changes. All that's needed is that (for instance) Clang would have a new option `clang build` which looks for a build.c/cpp file, compiles that into an executable and runs it.

The actual build system functionality is 'just' an extension to the stdlib.

It could, but then it would be tied to that specific compiler and the platforms it supports.

So is the mess of ISO defined languages, where compiler toolchains are an abstract concept.

Also a good point to note that OpenGroup and POSIX never bothered to standardise UNIX package management.

Yeah, just Clang doing its own thing would be useless. It would have to go through the C and C++ committees, at least for the stdlib parts (and this is basically the show stopper for the idea unfortunately).

vcpkg + CMake ?

It can compile almost any dependency on demand, even doing cross-compilation. And it's used by at least Microsoft and Google.

Such a setup includes two complex tools from two different parties plus a different C/C++ compiler toolchain per platform and platform SDKs (at least GCC, Clang (plus its Apple flavour) and MSVC). All those tools working together flawlessly at any given time is a minor miracle.

In Zig all those things are in the same toolchain install, which is a a single executable plus a bunch of platform-system-headers and -libraries, all under a single version number and trivially downloadable as a zip archive which works right after unzipping without setting up paths or running an 'installer'.

> With hindsight, it is strange that the C community, with all the people and money behind it (and what scale!) never even managed to build a proper packaging manager (okay, there's now Conan, but that came from Python guys).

Package managers are a lot more complex than people realize. Every attempt I've seen in every language has significant lacks for common real world cases.

Most commonly they assume all the world is their language. Very commonly they want to take over all package management but don't have a good easy story for working with the OS package manager (I know Windows doesn't really have a package manager - but you still need to interoperate with it!). Those are big issues anyone in a complex project will face in the real world, there are also lots of little warts that will bite you.

Yes package managers are nice on your trival project. However they all get in the way in your non-complex project - some more than others.

Weird take. Does pip have to interface with the Windows or iOS package managers? No. Yet it's wildly successful.

> Does pip have to interface with the Windows or iOS package managers? No. Yet it's wildly successful.

Successful I agree. I have issues on any system I use it on because now I have the package installed by PIP and the package installed by my OS package manager - slightly different.

If you use pip without protection, it will gladly and malevolently mess up your system. Every Python user learns quickly about the virtual environment work around. Various distributions (e.g. through Homebrew on Os X, Arch Linux, Ubuntu Linux) ship pip without the ability to make system-wide installations (externally-managed-environment). Even on Windows, where there is no standardized package management system, doing a pip install will place a bunch of dlls in the system's PATH that could get in the way of any program on your system.

The anti-solution of ignoring the problem is what got us here.

Why would anyone want to integrate with the OS package manager? Windows, as you've said yourself, doesn't even have one (and thank goodness for that) while on Linux, the distributed packages are normally about 2 to 4 years out of date — unless you discover and use specific 3rd-party repositories at which point what's even the point then? Just use the language's CPAN/PyPI/Hex/Crates.io/etc. analogue.

> Why would anyone want to integrate with the OS package manage

Because if they don't integrate you end up with several different versions of the same package installed. When you program grabs the wrong version how do you fix it. Now what if you are in support trying to help a customer.

> on Linux, the distributed packages are normally about 2 to 4 years out of date

Maybe you need to find a different distribution. Some make it a point to be out of date. Some make it a point to be up to date.

Windows has winget

In the unix world we use distribution package managers. This has many advantages, including security updates, some robustness against supply chain attacks, large-scale integration. All this language-level packaging systems are a mistake in my opinion.

How I see is that the only thing that changes is that you can't do @importC anymore. You'll instead do something in build.zig that produces a module which you can then addImport("my-c-lib", generated_module); which you then @import("my-c-lib"); in your zig code as you would with @cImport.

This does not seem bad in paper. One thing that does worsen with this is that in @cImport you could also comptime define preprocessor macros which was really cool, now that would have to be handled by build.zig I guess.

This makes the experience more similar to Rust (which I don’t think is bad—it’s just not as unique, smooth, and impressive as the current Zig experience).

I’ve been able to convince C programmers to try out and use Zig just due to this unique ability alone, and to be clear, getting C programmers to seriously consider any language other than C is generally very difficult!

Having to consider another build system (with its own semantics), which the current Zig experience doesn’t require, changes the experience much more substantially than I think the Zig team realizes.

> This makes the experience more similar to Rust

The big difference to the Rust ecosystem (or rather the 'cc' crates.io package which AFAIK is the current standard solution) is that there will be a Clang toolchain package with integrated cross-compilation headers and libraries that is used across all platforms instead of relying on a "platform C/C++ compiler toolchain" - which is the actually brittle part: different compilers, linkers and platform SDKs used on different platforms).

Ideally that same integrated Clang toolchain package used and provided by Zig could also be used by Rust to improve the C/C++/ObjC cross-compilation situation (similar to how the Zig toolchain is sometimes already used for this purpose).

> The big difference to the Rust ecosystem (or rather the 'cc' crates.io package which AFAIK is the current standard solution) is that there will be a Clang toolchain package with integrated cross-compilation headers and libraries that is used across all platforms instead of relying on a "platform C/C++ compiler toolchain" - which is the actually brittle part: different compilers, linkers and platform SDKs used on different platforms).

Yes, this is a very good point. Zig remains unique and impressive in that sense. The fact that Zig compiles the correct libc and other system libraries on demand is actually another one of those, “How come no other language considered doing this before Zig?!?”

I truly wish that Rust would steal this from Zig, but I haven't heard any actual interest in it from the project. Oh well. I think it's a real missed opportunity.

https://crates.io/crates/cargo-zigbuild exists though.

Having worked with Rust I would say that is bad. @cImport is way better than the C introp in Rust.

You will probably be able to do it from the command line too (for build-exe, run, etc).

The translate-c build system step and wrapping the output in a Zig module is currently about 10 lines in build.zig, and I guess this could be reduced further by merging those two steps into a single step.

I think that's an acceptable compromise.

Especially for C libraries which require configuration via preprocessor defines or compilation flags, the build.zig way is a lot cleaner than the @-builtins that are currently used (IMHO).

D has made some improvements on C interop with importC, if you want to check that out: https://dlang.org/spec/importc.html

What's the problem? @cImport is becoming just @import.

@cImport works without build.zig and even with build.zig requires no special configuration (ignoring linking).

As it is currently described, @import of C will require build.zig and specific configuration therein.

And form my experience from Rust that is much less ergonomic. Maybe Zig will do it better than Rust but who knows?

build.zig is on its way to being essential.

I consider that an appropriate development. Binaries need to be built, this should be integrated with the rest of the system in any modern language.

It's not incompatible with using something like CMake or Ninja either, it just puts certain responsibilities inside of build.zig. Where they belong.

I don't think that's the case. In general you can set up @import modules from the command line, and I'm not 100% sure but I think build.zig generally just templates a command line call anyways.

I don't think this DSL is finalized yet, but you can see on a linked issue what the build.zig to support @import of C looks like on nightly:

    const translate_c = b.addTranslateC(.{
        .root_source_file = b.path("src/c.h"),
        .target = target,
        .optimize = optimize,
    });
    exe.root_module.addImport("c", translate_c.createModule());

https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/20648

It won't require build.zig, you'll just have to run zig translate-c on the C file. Andrew's comment here[1] says that @cImport is basically @import + the compiler implicitly running translate-c for you. There was some discussion of removing the translate-c subcommand as well (which would force you to use build.zig), but I don't think it's been decided to do that.

[1] https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/20630#issuecomment-225...

> What's the problem? @cImport is becoming just @import.

You’re oversimplifying what’s actually a significant change.

Right now, I can do the following:

1. Download a prebuilt Zig release [0], on a fresh computer (zero prerequisites).

2. Implement a C library foo via foo.h and foo.c.

3. Compile foo.c into an object file foo.o via `zig cc`, using standard GNU-compatible compiler flags, for virtually any of the common (and even not-so-common) compilation targets.

4. Implement a Zig program bar via bar.zig.

5. Directly import foo.h into bar.zig via `@cImport` and use the C API as if it was Zig code.

6. Compile bar.zig and foo.o into a statically-linked executable baz via `zig build-exe`, for virtually any of the common (and even not-so-common) compilation targets.

No knowledge of the Zig build system and its semantics necessary. This is one of the most attractive aspects of Zig for a C programmer. I’ve gone through these exact steps with C programmers who thought Zig seemed interesting in theory but just didn’t want to have to learn a new ecosystem, build system, etc. The moment I showed them how quickly they could get up and running with Zig (and test it out with C code), without even having to install anything, it suddenly was impressive enough to experiment with.

The build system requirement may seem minor if you’re already a Zig programmer, but it’s massive if you want to attract C systems programmers.

[0]: https://ziglang.org/download

I think someone who doesn't know what they are talking about about is asserting a build.zig requirement. I don't know for sure, but probably it will work with the command line?

> The build system requirement may seem minor if you’re already a Zig programmer, but it’s massive if you want to attract C systems programmers.

You won't need knowledge of the build system nor a 'build.zig'.

After step 4 you would run 'zig translate-c' on 'foo.h'. Then use '@import' instead of '@cImport' in step 5 for the translated file.

'@cImport' is basically just doing that under the hood. It's an additional step for the user, that's a fair point, but I definitely wouldn't call it massive.

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