Zig: A programming language designed for robustness, optimality, and clarity –  Andrew Kelley

Zig is really interesting, and the explicit allocators is a feature I miss in many other system languages (like Rust). Presentation by the Zig author is a good introduction to the concept ▶ this video

in “Big Integers in Zig” · View on HN

▶ this video Software Should Be Perfect - A journey of questioning assumptions and building a new programming language This has been my goal since the beginning. I wasn't kidding

in “Zig's new CLI progress bar explained” · View on HN

> So I assume you could make a standard compliant compiler that doesn't nothing but immediately overflows the stack. Interesting thought. I imagine just about every language spec (with the possible exception of assembly languages) states something like If memory is exhausted, a handler is executed or If memory is exhausted, the behaviour is undefined , and it's always going to be up to the compiler/interpreter to make reasonable use of the available memory on the specific target platform. Would a C compiler be non-compliant if it generated code that used 100x the memory that would be used by code generated by typical C compiler? How about 1,000,000,000x so that its generated programs always failed immediately? Java is an interesting case for this, as it famously doesn't require that a garbage collector needs to be included at all (unlike .Net which does). In Java, not only are you permitted to have a conservative GC, you're permitted to have no GC whatsoever (something OpenJDK now offers [0]). Apparently [1] Java requires that the collector (if it exists) will run before the JVM throws OutOfMemoryError . I imagine the formal methods folks must have done some thinking on this topic, as their whole field is about doing better than just go ahead and test it out . Could a standards-compliant C compiler used in a safety-critical domain generate code that, only very occasionally, uses a billion times the memory it typically uses? Somewhat related: one of the motivations behind the

in “How Tail Call Optimization Works” · View on HN

Zig does however go a long way towards memory safety, to be fair, and if you wanted to, you could also argue similarly that Rust does not guarantee 100% OOM safety whereas Zig does: ▶ this video I would also say that for "very large long lived projects", memory safety is not actually the most important issue, but rather correctness, followed by (in no particular order) safety, performance, explicitness, readability and exhaustive fine-grained error handling, the latter also not found in too many languages besides Zig.

in “Why Zig when there is already C++, D, and Rust?” · View on HN

> I think there's room for other languages to occupy a similar space but they're need to focus on no-std-lib no-runtime operation (not always the sexiest target). You're describing the Zig language! It aims to be as fast as C, and unlike most languages that say this is a goal, it means it. There's no "almost as fast as C if you ignore the garbage-collector and the array-bounds-checking", it's actually as fast as C. Its author values the minimalism of C, but wants to create a far better language for doing that sort of work. [0] They're doing surprisingly well. They even managed to make a faster-than-C (faster even than hand-tuned assembly) SHA-2 [1] [0] [link] , [link] [1] [link] , it's also mentioned somewhere in this talk ▶ this video

in “Pointers Are More Abstract Than You Might Expect in C” · View on HN

Obviously Zig's output (courtesy of its LLVM backend) can be expressed and distributed as assembly code, but it's not hand-tuned, it's compiler-generated. Whether the hand-tuned assembly code they used was the fastest out there, I'm not sure. I'd hope so, or they're being misleading. I might get time to re-watch the relevant part of the video - it's around the 21 minutes mark - ▶ this video

in “Pointers Are More Abstract Than You Might Expect in C” · View on HN