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Comment by tcfhgj | Hacker News Reader

So riiR is now riiZ? ;)

"Rewrite it away from C (or C++)". Whether you choose Rust, Zig, Ada, D, Nim, even Pascal, it's likely going to become more secure. It will be supported on fewer platforms though, but still should run fine under Linux, macOS, Windows, *BSD, on x64, Arm64, and likely RISC-V, too.

Zig isn't memory safe, though. It's safer than C or C++, but not much.

This is what I have struggled to understand about Zig. It seems pretty much like C in a mental model aspect - you are responsible for everything. It's slightly better than C, but C already runs on everything on the planet and can be made secure even if painfully so. So what niche is Zig aiming to fill?

no, null pointers are enforced safe at the type level in zig, as are array bounds, this eliminates huge classes of errors, so you are not "responsible for everything". unlike c, you often (unless highly tuned performance is needed) do not have to resort to opaque void pointers, and the compiler gives you typesafety on that, another major footgun in c.

also operators and integer types are unambiguous, and there is no UB in safe compilation modes.

It's arguably much better than C, not "slightly better than C"

If you write a modern style of C, you can have bounds checked code and do not need to use void pointers. I usually find that people overestimate the advantages of newer languages compared to using C by comparing to old and badly written C.

GP: "you are responsible for everything"

AKA You are responsible for opting into "modern C". In order to be unsafe in zig (in the dimensions I mentioned) you must opt out.

You would need to opt-in into zig first, which is more effort than opting into modern C when you come from C.

i suggest you show this thread to a neutral third party and ask them if your line of argument makes sense.

Considering that basically nobody uses Zig, I think most neutral third-parties seem to agree.

I used Zig for my projects for a while, but moved back to C for similar reasons. C23, with gcc extensions, and using MISRA-like coding style where it makes sense, provides a similar experience to Zig but with seamless C interop. You dont have comptime, but my biggest lesson from my time in Zig is that I usually want to pass a vtable instead of monomophizing over input types.

Zig detects memory leaks pretty well when you build it using -Doptimize=Debug.

checked array bounds is memory safety.

Runtime bounds checking, but only in Debug/ReleaseSafe builds, besides there are many other types of memory safety issues left unaddressed.

> Runtime bounds checking

Compile time slice bounds checking is generally not a thing, since the length is not known until runtime. Its still safe.

> but only in Debug/ReleaseSafe builds

So, the default build modes?

Istg zig should just eliminate releasefast and releasesmall and force you to opt in on a function by function basis.

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