rvrb (u/rvrb) - Readit News

rvrb commented on Anthropic acquires Bun bun.com/blog/bun-joins-an... · Posted by u/ryanvogel

Search for pointer exceptions or core dumps on Bun's GitHub issues and you'll see why people (should) use Deno over Bun, if only because Rust is a way more safe language than Zig.

rvrb · 12 days ago

I haven't verified this, but I would be willing to bet that most of Bun's issues here have more to do with interfacing with JavaScriptCore through the C FFI than Zig itself. this is as much a problem in Rust as it is in Zig. in fact, it has been argued that writing unsafe Zig is safer than writing unsafe Rust: https://zackoverflow.dev/writing/unsafe-rust-vs-zig/

rvrb commented on Migrating the main Zig repository from GitHub to Codeberg ziglang.org/news/migratin... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

BrouteMinou · 18 days ago

Biting the hand that fed you. I hope he's going to donate some of the money is getting begging to codeberg in return of their services.

rvrb · 18 days ago

you say this like it's some own or something, but I'd be more surprised if they didn't. believe it or not, they are already donating some of their funds to the upstream ecosystem[0].

[0]: https://ziglang.org/news/2025-financials/

rvrb commented on Zig and the design choices within blueberrywren.dev/blog/on... · Posted by u/lerno

lerno · a month ago

I have never heard anyone calling Zig "famously simple" before. In fact, people tend to say it has quite the learning curve.

Of course, caveats apply: it is certainly simple compared to some languages, but certainly not compared to others. "Famously simple" seems to indicate it is one of the simplest languages to learn, which seems wrong unless there are some serious qualifications to that statement?

rvrb · a month ago

C, C++, Rust, Zig. Rust and C++ have an infamous learning curve. If you know anything about using any systems language other than Zig, Zig is incredibly simple to pick up, like C. Unlike C, it pushes you toward making less mistakes.

If you don't know anything about using a systems language, Zig makes it easier for the people who do to review your code and make sure you didn't mess it up. It does this with very intentional design that makes it easier to understand the full impact of code quickly, reducing the cost of review, making review practical to catch the issues. It also has many other fail safes to catch these problems before they ever reach a production release.

So, yeah, it's totally depending on where you are coming from -- but Zig is not a tool built for a web developer who doesn't know anything about memory to go and ship an application within their first week. It does make it easier for that person to learn the ropes at a steady pace.

Meanwhile, everyone complaining that Zig is not memory safe doesn't seem to care that applications written in Zig do not have the vulnerabilities that memory safety solves on the scale that C does[0].

If you have not written a real application in Zig and evaluated it for vulnerabilities, but are claiming that creating Zig was irresponsible, and using it is too; you are cargo culting.

If you have, you probably understand there is a niche that Zig fits in and that it isn't surprising it exists to fill it. Like all things in our industry, there is a cost/benefit analysis required for choosing the tools you build with.

No one reasonable has claimed that memory safe languages should not exist, but there is a maddening number of people being disrespectful toward those who think there are other ways of addressing the same problems.

[0]: https://mitchellh.com/writing/ghostty-gtk-rewrite

rvrb commented on Zig and the design choices within blueberrywren.dev/blog/on... · Posted by u/lerno

James_K · a month ago

Creating a language which is difficult to use and dangerous is not “lending humanity to the developer”. Humans make mistakes, and a language that doesn't account for this is ignoring the humanity of its users.

rvrb · a month ago

Zig is famously simple to pick up and write with, so I don't know what you mean by "difficult". Software is dangerous. Memory safety is one of a million ways it can be dangerous. A compiler barfing when it thinks you are doing something unsafe with pointers is one approach to dealing with one of the ways that code can be dangerous to execute.

Zig does not ignore that particular danger, it just takes a different approach to dealing with it than some other modern languages. An approach that, I believe, leaves the developer with a little more humanity by allowing them the benefit of the doubt that they know what they are doing.

Everyone that has not built a systems language, or has not built a real application with both Zig and a memory safe language, that is reacting emotionally to what I've said should put a lot of consideration into whether they are cargo culting or using critical thought. Consider that we still do not yet know what is best, and shutting down attempts to explore different ideas with things like "creating [and using] this language is ignoring the humanity of the end user" is, well.. dumb.

rvrb commented on Zig and the design choices within blueberrywren.dev/blog/on... · Posted by u/lerno

brabel · a month ago

> Nice way to put it! But I oppositely believe the world needs more tech that treats professionals as experts, not kids.

That’s how it was until around the turn of the century. Who needs types, we’re adults after all. Memory safety and garbage collection? Oh please go back to kindergarten.

But then some of us learned that no matter how smart we are, we can make mistakes that those things can actually prevent. And those mistakes can have catastrophic consequences. Professionals should go for tools that help them prevent those mistakes, right??

rvrb · a month ago

Zig is a tool that helps professionals prevent those mistakes.

"Memory safe languages" are tools that prevent professionals from making those mistakes.

It's a subtle but important difference. Zig attempts to leave some humanity to the developer.

When someone says they are incapable of earning or deserving that, I feel sad.

rvrb commented on Why is Zig so cool? nilostolte.github.io/tech... · Posted by u/vitalnodo

meisel · a month ago

For a language that’s so low level and performance focused, I’m surprised that it has those extra io and allocator arguments to functions. Isn’t that creating code bloat and runtime overhead?

rvrb · a month ago

the answer I've seen when it has been brought up before is that (for allocators) there is not a practical impact on performance -- allocating takes way more time than the virtual dispatch does, so it ends up being negligible. for code bloat, I'm not sure what you mean exactly; the allocator interface is implemented via a VTable, and the impact on binary size is pretty minimal. you're also not really creating more than a couple of allocators in an application (typically a general purpose allocator, and maybe an arena allocator that wraps it in specific scenarios).

for IO, which is new and I have not actually used yet, here are some relevant paragraphs:

  The new Io interface is non-generic and uses a vtable for dispatching function calls to a concrete implementation. This has the upside of reducing code bloat, but virtual calls do have a performance penalty at runtime. In release builds the optimizer can de-virtualize function calls but it’s not guaranteed.
  
  ...
  
  A side effect of proposal #23367, which is needed for determining upper bound stack size, is guaranteed de-virtualization when there is only one Io implementation being used (also in debug builds!).

https://kristoff.it/blog/zig-new-async-io/

https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/23367

rvrb commented on Why is Zig so cool? nilostolte.github.io/tech... · Posted by u/vitalnodo

badtuple · a month ago

I was also curious what direction the article was going to take. The showcase is cool, and the features you mentioned are cool. But for me, Zig is cool is because all the pieces simply fit together with essentially no redundancy or overloading. You learn the constructs and they just compose as you expect. There's one feature I'd personally like added, but there's nothing actually _missing_. Coding in it quickly felt like using a tool I'd used for years, and that's special.

Zig's big feature imo is just the relative absence of warts in the core language. I really don't know how to communicate that in an article. You kind of just have to build something in it.

rvrb · a month ago

out of curiosity, what feature do you want?

rvrb commented on Why is Zig so cool? nilostolte.github.io/tech... · Posted by u/vitalnodo

didip · a month ago

Is it cool? It seems to be in nether land between Rust and Go. Not sure what is the unique use case for Zig.

rvrb · a month ago

not being a direct competitor to either of these already existing languages is exactly why it is interesting!

rvrb commented on Why is Zig so cool? nilostolte.github.io/tech... · Posted by u/vitalnodo

rvrb · a month ago

I've tried writing a similar post, but I think it's a bit difficult to sound convincing when talking about why Zig is so pleasant. it's really not any one thing. it's a culmination of a lot of well made, pragmatic decisions that don't sound significant on their own. they just culminate in a development experience that feels pleasantly unique.

a few of those decisions seem radical, and I often disagreed with them.. but quite reliably, as I learned more about the decision making, and got deeper into the language, I found myself agreeing with them afterall. I had many moments of enlightenment as I dug deeper.

so anyways, if you're curious, give it an honest chance. I think it's a language and community that rewards curiosity. if you find it fits for you, awesome! luckily, if it doesn't, there's plenty of options these days (I still would like to spend some quality time with Odin)