Zig Guide
zig.guide
zig.guide
That, along with the number of memory-related issues in one of Zig’s most popular project, Bun.js [#2], gives me pause.
[#1]: https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/2646
[#2]: https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/issues?q=is%3Aissue+segfault
Just kidding ;) It was hobby development, of course. Building demos and games in HolyC was how I finally started learning lower-level software.
I don't know if mutable noalias has been already enabled for good, but even if there are no changes between compiler versions, those mutable noalias rules are super-tricky to get right.
In Zig, a pointer is just regular thing, you take care, but most pointers are arena-allocated anyway, and that's a bit like runtime-branded lifetime (which is great and Rust cannot do that, at least not in idiomatic Rust).
People say, “oh, it’s safer than C because tests can warn of missed deinits” but the fact is it isn’t memory safe by design and it’s not a priority for the language.
There are still reasons to use it and there are domains where memory safety isn’t a priority, but memory safety depends on the same mix of linters, code review, simple memory models, a deep understanding of how memory works, minimal dependencies and luck just like in C. Although none of those things will save you on their own or combined. If memory safety is a priority I’d consider other languages.
Much better than C will ever be, but still with gotchas like use after free, or hardware mapped variables.
More interesting would be threading and process/shared memory synchronization problems and limitations. At least on Linux in theory the latter should be fuzzable with scheduler API, but I am unaware of solutions. The former works via thread sanitizer, undo thread fuzzing and rr chaos mode, but I am unaware of solutions to test lock- and wait-free code besides trying really hard to create race conditions and comparing expected results to observe the race conditions, which does not cover temporal race conditions not observable at a later point.
Your statement like the general "safety" discussion is missing numbers on compilation time vs run time cost and coverage or any form of metrics to estimate risk vs benefit with cut-off values. Specifically input set/formulae coverage for functions and component planning would be interesting to discuss systems at scale (not basic code coverage), but I am unable to get decent information on that.
Does a stack overflow trigger a crash, or does it cause undefined behavior and/or remote code execution? You'd have a point if it's the latter, but I also assumed that I would have heard about it before if that were true.
And if it's not the latter, then it's not a failure of memory safety as most people mean it.
For formal proofs the effort scales quadratically, does Rust code also become quadratically slower with some constant factor? I'd assume runtime-checks could provide statistical safety and each component may need statistics tweaking unless being small enough/verified/edge cases enumerable with reasonable certainty etc. Are you aware of any known statistics or work besides the 0,x bugs per 1000 lines of code taking into account classes of bugs? Or what is your take on this?
All of them, with the notable exception of tigerbeetle, a financial transactions database, have issue trackers which are littered with users reporting segfaults. I don’t really know if it’s more common than in popular Rust repositories, but this is my highly anecdotal, qualitative investigation.
What worries me is that when you dig into specific issues for root causes, there seem to be a lot of different root causes and not a lot of obvious fixes. And segfaults are just the tip of the iceberg, the most obvious memory errors. I don’t think people are reporting heap corruption in the same way, if ever.
In case of Bun, it's kind of mixed bag, as it relies on JSCore from WebKit. A lot of its issues are from the the engine.
Context is needed, in regards to safety. Zig, attempts to be safer than C, but then so do many other C alternatives and replacements. C3, Odin, Jai, Nim, D, etc... In fact, V (Vlang) could be seen as making a better argument for safety, because it provides even more default safety features and uses an optional GC. None of its libraries depend on the GC and it can be completely turned off (via cmdline flag).
I switched from objective-c to swift thinking job done, and felt like I was learning a new language with each new version. I ended up switching back to objective-c.
I think Java had a good start by defining a solid language spec (JLS) up front, which was a bible during the rapid standard library expansion days, but the JVM stayed stable at least.
I left Golang behind because of the same academic churn in language design that I saw in Swift.
So at the moment I really love coding in Zig. It already does everything I need it too already, and anyway I cant upgrade past 0.8.1 because 'old mac', and wont run on Asahi M1 because 'new mac'. But I assume in trying to be a good C replacement, these are temporary limitations, especially now it can self compile.
What I really enjoy is that I can use it for very lightweight WASM / web front-end stuff, and at the other end of the client scale, I am using it for some SOC programming on the PinePhone. I know C has the same reach, but my days of looking up ** semantics in K&R are long past!
Hopefully we'll get a solid language spec soon, and the language changes will slow to a crawl once 1.0 approaches. As for the lacking documentation that is always a complaint, I'll hopefully try to contribute to that when I start my new Zig project in May.
Anyway respect and thanks to Andrew and the team for all the hard work they are doing. It is an amazing project and I hope it works out.
What? Go is one of the most stable languages I can think of. What churn are you referring to?
It should be better noted on this website, but this is not the official Zig guide - which can be found here: https://ziglang.org/learn/
(And while yes, Zig does make reference to zig.guide because it's very helpful and people appreciate the effort put into it - but it's still under the other online learning resource section, not official documentation section)
So far, it feels like though there's been a bunch of things to learn, they all fit together easily in a small mental space. It does generally feel like they've redesigned C for the modern times without going overboard, and succeeded to an admirable degree in the goal of being a simple language.
One major thing I appreciate about the official Zig Language Reference is that it is no-pagination single html page that I can ctrl+f https://ziglang.org/documentation/master/ I wish more projects published their docs like that.
When I read, my mouse is busy selecting different parts of the text that I'm thinking about.
1. I don't want to move my mouse off the text to click the "next" button.
2. I don't want to move my mouse off the text to expand TOC items.
3. I don't want to waste my time on switching between pages back and forth.
I prefer the raw text on a long scrollable, non-interactive page with TOC on the side.
Otherwise, great to see more guides on the Zig topic.
That said, they're not winning on the docs, community and marketing front vs Rust. It's not really apples to apples, but it's a comparison people naturally draw.
The unstable part might be why. That said, I’m a little familiar with it as it’s what Bun uses.
Obviously, it takes time for a language to get there; I don't really mean this as a criticism. But I'm just not interested in wrapping C libraries while I wait for a zig version. I'd rather just write C. Or work in a language that is there with these kinds of things.
This is why everybody says just use some existing c lib
I also doubt I have space to enumerate the languages that claim to "easily wrap c libs." None of them easily do that. That statement imagines that there's some basic consistency between APIs (and that those APIs are asking for and returning fairly simple types).
(If you're hearing a combative tone, it's unintended; I'm asking seriously, because I would love for this to be true!)
I think parent means that Zig is a better language with regards to being the target for C to be imported into than C and that is the benefit of being a more modern language with flexibility following more modern conventions. This is combined with the mostly seamless ability to utilize most C functions and types without too much strife.
for example if two c libs declare a function with the same name youre not gonna have a good time using them both from c. I believe that's not a problem in zig.
I see zig catching up in popularity because people are appreciating the simplicity it is trying to achieve.
Personally, I don't really care about languages. I'll use whatever language I have to in order to try a library/engine I'm interested in. Currently I'm looking at trying Godot, Bevy and O3DE. As they all seem to be used to some extent right now. Note that none of those are written in Zig (or Odin). Maybe that will change after 1.0?