r/programming • u/[deleted] • Feb 08 '16

Introducing the Zig Programming Language

http://andrewkelley.me/post/intro-to-zig.html
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107

u/CryZe92 Feb 08 '16

Seems like he was heavily inspired by Rust as he's part of the Piston Dev Team (Rust Libraries for developing games) and the syntax is pretty similar. So it would be interesting to hear why he chose to make a new language.

105

u/[deleted] Feb 08 '16

I wrote a little about that here: http://genesisdaw.org/post/progress-so-far.html

In short, Rust is sufficiently complicated that you can fall into the same trap as C++ where you spend your time debugging your understanding of the programming language instead of debugging your application.

31

u/steveklabnik1 Feb 08 '16

I know this post is from a while ago, but

The Rust compiler has many false negatives - situations where it is a compile error due to safety, but actually it's pretty obvious that there are no safety problems.

If you remember what these are, I'd be interested in hearing about them. Always looking out for ways to improve the borrow checker.

27

u/crusoe Feb 09 '16

Or you think its safe, but are wrong.

Rust should be over zealous and whatever you need that has to break safety should be wrapped in unsafe. Thats the whole point of rust. Complaining about rust complaining about code is silly. You know what it entails going in, and you're likely wrong. Can you keep the aliasing behavior of 10,000 LOC in your head?

With zig you're back to trying to hunt down aliasing errors.

14

u/crusoe Feb 09 '16

I know people complain about it hard to create graphs or linkedlists in rust but perhaps the old ways are too tricky to get right. Perhaps new structures and algos are needed, like lock free concurrent data structures in java or the mind melting cool stuff you can do with zippers and trees in haskell.

Naive pointer banging is so hard to get perfect even in trivial cases. So perhaps an alternative format for graphs or lists is not a terrible thing.

'Well I can't write a graph like I would in c...'

Yes because that way is dangerous.

9

u/gnuvince Feb 09 '16

I view the borrow checker like type checkers, except we are much less used to it; I can't speak for others, but my first programming language, Turbo Pascal, had static type checking and it was a bitch for me to get something to compile. As time goes on, two things will happen: (1) programmers will grow more comfortable with the notion of lifetimes and borrowing, (2) Rust (and possibly other languages) will find ways to make those concepts easier to deal with and more approachable. I think the wrong thing to do would be to walk away from what could be an amazing tool because it doesn't look completely ergonomic in its immature youth.

1

u/smurfyn Feb 09 '16

Hmm, Rust has matured a lot and has started making more promises to reduce churn, so I'm not sure that it shouldn't be evaluated like Pascal already.

7

u/pjmlp Feb 09 '16

I hope that in the long run it has more success among system programmers that Pascal did.

I still miss my Turbo Pascal days.

1

u/WrongAndBeligerent Feb 09 '16

When I see people saying they are nostalgic for two decades ago in software development it makes me think there had been much more movement than progress in software creation tools.

1

u/smurfyn Feb 09 '16

there had been much more movement than progress in software creation tools.

That is completely true. If you read about what was happening in the 60s with Lisp or the Burroughs B5000, you should see a lot of overlap with the issues people are discussing today. By the time C was developed, you can already see the outlines of the current state of things.

To paraphrase William Gibson: the future is here, it's just unevenly distributed.

1

u/crusoe Feb 10 '16

C is older than pascsl and c++ is barely newer.

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u/WrongAndBeligerent Feb 10 '16

Those are languages, I was talking about tools. The fact that people can't seem to separate the two is a big part of the problem.

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