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Comment by slopinthebag | Hacker News Reader

Have they said how many breaking changes requiring a rewrite Zig will be going through before it stabilises?

Also I thought Zig doesn't have interfaces....how does the IO one work?

Interfaces can still be expressed using vtables. You just have to write the vtable yourself rather than have the language do it for you.

Also, Zig's tagged unions (enums with payloads in Rust) are really ergonomic and often what you want instead of interfaces. Alot of languages that use interfaces simply don't expose a good way of doing it so everyone reaches for interfaces by default. But if you don't need an actual interface then this way you don't even have to pay the cost of runtime dynamic dispatch.

Are there any plans to add syntax sugar for interacting with vtables?

Wish we could bribe Andrew Kelley to add a built-in for this. There are only a couple of regular ways that everyone creates these vtables. Might as well just standardize it.

I feel like a std lib module would be sufficient.

Sadly no, as fas as I'm aware. I can't think of creating vtables manually every time I need to create interfaces, I guess Zig is not for me.

Yeah I don't understand why a language cannot automate something that routine and boilerplate-y.

Oh well, people like it so I won't judge, I'm happy we have choices for what languages we use. Just wish people would choose safe ones :/

It has C style interfaces, meaning structs with function pointers.

Which is basically how most device drivers in OSes that happen to be written in C, including UNIX flavours, work.

We all know that OP wasn't asking about THAT kind of interface and more "please create vtables for me" style of interface

That is too much compiler magic for Zig folks.

You know, I used to be annoyed by all your consistently shitty remarks in any zig related HN thread, but these days, it's refreshing to have an unpleasant interaction with a human.

Sincerely, thanks for all your hand-written hatred.

It goes both ways, when I see remarks regarding other languages from Zig community folks, not from you directly.

Modula-2 like safety is still better than C will ever be, though.

Yeah, it will be human as far as I can take it, cheers.

Perhaps it can be a relief to make assessments about a couple of newer C alternative languages[1][2]. Zen C appears to be moving up very quickly, and even has autofree.

[1]: https://github.com/c3lang/c3c (C3)

[2]: https://github.com/zenc-lang/zenc (Zen C)

That's a hack, not an interface lol

You would be terrified if you realized how the whole C-based GNOME/GTK ecosystem works :)

How is it a hack? I mean, you may not like the fact that Zig does not provide syntax sugar for interfaces, but how exactly do you think they are implemented in languages that do?

As plenty of other things in an "everything is explicit" language, whose goal is to be a safer C and nothing else.

The "module" system is another hack.

If they knew what all of the 0.x breaking changes were going to be ahead of time they wouldn't need to be trying out different choices to see how well they really pan out!

Breaking changes don't require a rewrite.

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