AndyKelley

Now you've misquoted me. Actual quote[1] is: "This appears to be an outright fabrication."

To quote yourself[2], "The honest thing to do is acknowledge that you were mistaken and apologize for the false accusation."

Are you going to do that for me now?

I don't expect you to, because I don't think you are being dishonest. I think you are earnestly trying to untangle the facts from two parties for whom you have no bias one way or the other, which is commendable.

Like you, I am an individual attempting to paint an accurate picture of reality for my readers.

Anthropic, on the other hand, is not an individual nor trying to be accurate. They are doing exactly as they are supposed to: maximizing value for shareholders. To do this, they need to make this rewrite appear successful, so they need to retcon this idea that they were doing good engineering practices in their zig codebase the whole time, including fuzzing, even though that is not the case.

[1]: https://github.com/andrewrk/andrewkelley.me/blob/c39f868e578...

[2]: https://mastodon.social/@michael@m.mtlynch.io/11689618811296...

happy pride month

1. he's not a billionaire in large part due to giving away large amounts of wealth

2. would you rather allow a small number of people 10x more wealthy than Mitchell dictate our laws and culture, or would you prefer a more democratic approach?

If you decide to try this, feel free to share your progress and struggles on IRC, ziggit, or ZSF zulip. Plenty of people would be interested in helping out.

Good luck and happy hacking!

my implication is that you are projecting - believing that because something is true for you, it is therefore true for other people.

zsf team is perfectly capable of implementing compiler optimizations.

First I was naive to believe I could make a new programming language, then I was naive to believe it would be anything but a toy project, then I was naive to believe that we could make our own backends for debug mode, now I'm naive to believe that we can add optimizations to the pipeline. It's getting old. Just because you lack the creativity, willpower, and work ethic to accomplish something, doesn't mean I do.

your links don't back up your claims

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.

looks like llm written trash

it's crap. you all need to go outside

I used Node.js extensively for about a decade, both professionally and as a hobby. I don't buy the problem statement.

These arguments don't even make sense, they look LLM generated. I can't even formulate a disagreement against this nonsense.

Originally, Zig's type system was less disciplined in terms of the "zero" type (also known as "noreturn").

This was proposed, discussed, and accepted here: https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/3257

Later, Matthew Lugg made a follow-up proposal, which was discussed both publicly and in ZSF core team meetings. https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/15909

He writes:

> A (fairly uncontroversial) subset of this behavior was implemented in [the changeset we are discussing]. I'll close this for now, though I'll probably end up revisiting these semantics more precisely at some point, in which case I'll open a new issue on Codeberg.

I don't know how evident this is to the casual HN reader, but to me this changeset very obviously moves Zig the language from experimental territory a large degree towards being formally specified, because it makes type resolution a Directed Acyclic Graph. Just look at how many bugs it resolved to get a feel for it. This changeset alone will make the next release of the compiler significantly more robust.

Now, I like talking about its design and development, but all that being said, Zig project does not aim for full transparency. It says right there in the README:

> Zig is Free and Open Source Software. We welcome bug reports and patches from everyone. However, keep in mind that Zig governance is BDFN (Benevolent Dictator For Now) which means that Andrew Kelley has final say on the design and implementation of everything.

It's up to you to decide whether the language and project are in trustworthy hands. I can tell you this much: we (the dev team) have a strong vision and we care deeply about the project, both to fulfill our own dreams as well as those of our esteemed users whom we serve[1]. Furthermore, as a 501(c)(3) non-profit we have no motive to enshittify.

[1]: https://ziglang.org/documentation/master/#Zen

It's been incredible working with Matthew. I hope I can have the pleasure to continue to call him my colleague for many years to come.

It's not a great tip because there are features that exist specifically to reduce development iteration cycle latency without compiling for the wrong target.

Please refer to https://ziglang.org/download/0.15.1/release-notes.html#Incre...

This has nothing to do with agentic engineering. This is just normal software development. Everybody wants faster compilation speed

I propose let's break up a bunch of these monopolies to give you and your colleagues more options, more competition for your resume.

invitation tree. lobste.rs already has it, works great.

bitpacked structs, good enums, arbitrary sized integers, optionals + non-nullable pointers, fast compiler, zig fmt, unit testing, ability to use standard library and the rest of the third-party ecosystem on freestanding, std.ArrayList, std.AutoArrayHashMap, std.MultiArrayList, std.crypto, more productive type system, comptime, SIMD, slices, labeled switch continue, error handling, custom panic handler, stack traces on freestanding, error return traces, zero bit types, the build system, package management, aligned pointers, untagged union safety, multi-object for loops, inline switch cases, semantically guaranteed inline functions, inline loops

In Zig, error codes are fundamentally a control flow construct, not a reporting mechanism.

The pattern here is to return something like error.Diagnostics for all errors that have been reported via diagnostics.

The only reason you'd have a different error code would be if the control flow should be different. For example error.OutOfMemory makes sense to be separate because it's a retryable error, which means it should be handled by different control flow.

100% agreed.

HTTP client and server stay for sure.

flagged for being slop

As an example, a line that they don't cross, but a for-profit company absolutely would, is compromising the integrity of the encyclopedia articles. For example, a marketing department would pay a lot of money for Wikipedia to delete or soften https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversies_of_Nestl%C3%A9 but they'll never do that, not for profit at least.

I think you're letting pedantry hinder you from seeing a useful pattern.

No ads on Wikipedia tho, not even after 25 years.

I've always admired your work, Walter. Keep it up!

Sorry I got mixed up with FreeBSD: https://codeberg.org/ziglang/zig/issues/30981 (original github link has more information)

This affects static libc only. If you pass -dynamic -lc then the libc functions are provided by the target system. Some systems only support dynamic libc, such as macOS. I think OpenBSD actually does support static libc though.

This use case is unchanged.

If you specify -target x86_64-windows-gnu -lc then some libc functions are provided by Zig, some are provided by vendored mingw-w64 C files, and you don't need mingw-w64 installed separately; Zig provides everything.

You can still pass --libc libc.txt to link against an externally provided libc, such as a separate mingw-w64 installation you have lying around, or even your own libc installation if you want to mess around with that.

Both situations unchanged.

hallucinations in a libc implementation would be especially bad

Don't take the black pill.

The Department of Homeland Security was created in 2003. We didn't need it then and we don't need it now.

Why waste tax dollars on ineffective, privacy-violating security theater when we could spend it on education and health?