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Comment by bpavuk | Hacker News Reader

I am so used to thinking that Zig, Rust, and the likes are only viable in niches where C is viable, but no. not anymore at least - once this linker and incremental compilation on other targets land, Zig will become THE C replacement and that will let me iterate at the speed of JS or Python with performance of C or Rust. even Andrew's initial dream - to create a DAW with uncompromising UX - will become much easier to create. once someone creates a Zig-native immediate-mode or reactive UI framework, that is.

I am still a little salty about `@cImport` removal, though! without it, I can't confidently call it "Kotlin of C" anymore.

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> that will let me iterate at the speed of JS or Python with performance of C or Rust.

Didn't Go already do that?

> I am so used to thinking that Zig, Rust, and the likes are only viable in niches where C is viable, but no. not anymore at least - once this linker and incremental compilation on other targets land, Zig will become THE C replacement

Yes, and it will still only be useful in the same niche that C is because the entire philosophy of Zig is to essentially be like C. You're never going to interate at JS/Python speeds with Zig because you'll always be wrangling with memory lifecycles, object lifecycles, etc...

Rust is significantly different.

Go is for the cases where GC works for you (many, many cases).

Zig is for when you need control over the allocator (also many such cases).

Go is a terribly verbose language.

> Didn't Go already do that?

no. GC pauses turn any serious systems work into hell.

> Yes, and it will still only be useful [...]

this does not exclude the possibility of creation of libraries that manage everything for me within their domain of responsibility, such as dvui

> no. GC pauses turn any serious systems work into hell.

did you miss the context I was responding to? They were comparing against JS & Python and rapid iteration speeds. That's obviously not "serious systems work" where GC pauses matter

> this does not exclude the possibility of creation of libraries that manage everything for me within their domain of responsibility, such as dvui

Sure, but if you're philosophically okay with hidden allocations and control flow, why not just choose a language that doesn't compromise itself for those ideals in the first place?

Because they like and are excited about Zig.

> They were comparing

that was me comparing, please kindly read usernames next time :)

> why not just choose a language that doesn't compromise itself for those ideals in the first place?

I might want to wrap a timing-sensitive machinery into some nice UI. Rust has Tauri for that, sure, but now we are bringing npm and have zero chances of having GPU-accelerated UI without a crap-ton of fuckery which would be easier in Zig. another path for resolving that same issue is Compose Desktop + Project Panama, but then you are dealing with data marshalling, FFI boundary, and manual resource management in an environment that does not expect this.

so, here is a genius idea: why not have everything in one language? C++ already does that, much like C, but Zig does that so much better, and incremental compilation time is one of the more practical and immediate developer UX benefits it provides. Rust? good luck having shared mutable state there.

> Kotlin of C

That sounds good on paper. But as a guy who tried to learn Kotlin and only it. It comes with baggage to learn Java to use its libraries because... You know... they interact seamlessly and stuff. In the end, for a new learner, it might actually make things harder.

Nothing about Zig and C here, just a bit salty from my experience with Kotlin.

Kotlin <-> Java interop is a totally optional topic you could have skipped over, telling you as a Kotlin developer (who recently had to switch to .NET because Ukrainian job market is fucked up). besides, Java itself isn't that hard if it's Java 17 or newer, and it's rather good if it's Java 25 or newer

> Kotlin <-> Java interop is a totally optional topic you could have skipped over

This is the same place F# has been stuck in. It’s a great language on its own, but you can’t just use F#. Every F# must also do C# interop. It’s too 100% optional in theory, but never in practice. The best CLR/JVM libraries for anything are Java/C# ones. You need to interop with them to develop practical Kotlin/F# applications. You can limit yourself to the Kotlin/F# ones, but then you’re artificially limiting yourself to experimental libraries at best. You will find yourself needing a charting library, a DNS library, an SMTP library, an AWS SDK or a rabbitmq SDK. The best ones are gonna be Java/C#. Yes, you can always find a random GitHub repo for a “Kotlin-native X”, but the Java X library is a thousand times more mature, stable, performant, feature rich, etc. Same problem with F#. And the “glue” code is so “straight forward”, why would any one bother?

I have quite literally never had to do Java interop in my Kotlin work. Do you have an example?

In contrast, your statement about F# strikes me as mostly true - albeit my interop was always the other way around (consuming F# code from C#).

Calling Koltin co-routines directly from Java code, as an example.

There is a reason Android team has Java friendly guidelines.

Clojure also "comes with the baggage" of learning Java libraries.

And JavaScript comes with the baggage of learning about web browsers and NodeJS's "fs" module.

Kotlin also has its own features that differ from the way the JVM or Java has decided to develop them. For example: coroutines vs virtual threads or Kotlin “value” classes and Java value classes. The semantics don’t match and Kotlin stops becoming simply a “better Java”.

That is the curse of guest languages, see C and C++ as well.

That is why I always say keep with the platform, and why despite my endless rants on C, I keep myself up-to-date in regards to it.

Eventually they always diverge.

It'll be interesting long term to see where they go with Kotlin. WRT value classes they'll probably introduce something like @JvmValue like the did with @JvmRecord when data classes diverged from Java records.

They behave as if JVM was only relevant to bootstrap Kotlin ecosystem, especially since they became Google's darling on Android, and doubled down on Kotlin Multiplatform.

From all guest languages on the JVM, the Kotlin community is the one I rather avoid, as many behave thankless to the platform that actually makes their toy possible in first place.

Clojure, Groovy and even Scala, focus primarily on being nice with Java and having a symbiotic relationship.

Koltin folks are like "we're replacing Java, ahaha stupid language".

Well where is the Kotlin Virtual Machine, other than Android userspace, which nonetheless requires Java support to benefit from Maven Central ecosystem?

Certainly driven by Android folks, I would say.

Kotlin is a terrible language for learning, as it has a lot syntactic shortcuts that are easy to mistake for magic. I think it's actually easier to learn some Java first, as it's simpler and teaches you the semantics both languages (mostly) share.

It's already sort of possible. https://codeberg.org/fellowtraveler/flux here is my Zig DAW. It has been amazing for the audio engine, but the ui is currently using imgui.

I've tried building your project, but hit problems due to dependency hash mismatches. Do you have a screenshot somewhere?

idk, making @cImport just "@import" is an improvement imo.

`@import` that you have to configure in the build system first.

this makes porting projects gradually, file by file, rather cumbersome. now I have to rewrite quite a lot of Chocolate Doom because my port was halfway there and then @cImport got gutted... or keep going with Zig 0.16.2 until it's either 100% Zig or has little enough files that upgrading won't make my build.zig file implode in lines of code

i would have guessed easier, since it makes c modules and zig modules ~indistinguishable?

> Zig-native immediate-mode

dvui?

many thanks, will look into that...

> Zig, Rust, and the likes are only viable in niches where C is viable

Pretty much correct, yes.

> Zig will become THE C replacement and that will let me iterate at the speed of JS or Python with performance of C or Rust.

Fundamentally impossible. C/Zig/Rust have 100% performance as a top goal, which has to be traded off with something else and that's always realistically going to be programmer work/effort/time.

You can't have a house built 100% fast but also 100% cheap and with 100% quality. At best you could cleverly abuse the law of diminishing returns and aim for ~80% in all three areas. That's basically what Go's trying to do.

> once this linker and incremental compilation on other targets land,

In any case, why would a better linker and faster compile times of all things achieve this supposed goal?

Beyond being low level, Zig is still pretty memory unsafe and has you make choices about each allocation, making it unappealing as an applications language. Zig and Python are completely different worlds.

> You can't have a house built 100% fast but also 100% cheap and with 100% quality.

That’s essentially what technological development does, is make those tradeoffs more favorable.

No? The conventional engineering wisdom has always been: pick two out of fast, cheap, or good.

And technological improvements don't remove these tradeoffs. You still have to balance tradeoffs. The best thing you could do is have a mix of technologies that choose different tradeoffs. A single technology (zig) won't do.

> At best you could cleverly abuse the law of diminishing returns and aim for ~80% in all three areas. That's basically what Go's trying to do.

then how does Zig achieve ~90%?

> In any case, why would a better linker and faster compile times of all things achieve this supposed goal?

sub-100ms rebuild is actually more important as the project grows. when you iterate, you think differently. picking different colors or fonts or whatnot becomes much cheaper, so you are more willing to try

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