4 ms·

I meant a borrow checker, which I assumed was clear from what I was replying to. Yes, Zig does do runtime checks in dev builds and I did not mean to imply other

I meant a borrow checker, which I assumed was clear from what I was replying to. Yes, Zig does do runtime checks in dev builds and I did not mean to imply otherwise, I don't think the runtime checks provide the same set of benefits. Just so we're clear, I like Zig :-)

pron 6y ago
> I don't think the runtime checks provide the same set of benefits. Of course not, but that doesn't mean Zig is less effective at achieving correctness. It just does so in a different way -- it trades sound guarantees for less sound ones and a simpler language with a faster cycle. Is one better than the other? Hard to say. Only empirical study could settle that.
- fsociety 6y ago
  I’d argue it does mean it is less effective at achieving correctness but the trade-off made is the whole point of Zig. Simple language that is really a better C.
  - pron 6y ago
    It's hard to make a definitive argument one way or the other because the guarantees Rust makes come at a cost of compilation speed and language complexity that can have a negative effect on correctness. This question is impossible to answer without an empirical study. Unlike C, Zig is (or will be) memory safe, although its safety can be turned off, and often is -- after testing. Unlike C, it provides powerful abstraction capabilities similar to those of C++. The fact that it can do all that yet be very simple seems to suggest at first glance that it's "like C" but that's because we've never had a language like that before. Zig's simplicity is misleading. It turns out you can do a lot with a very simple language. We knew that to be true for high-level languages like Scheme, but Zig shows it's possible in low-level languages, too.
    - AsyncAwait 6y ago
      > It's hard to make a definitive argument one way or the other because the guarantees Rust makes come at a cost of compilation speed I don't think this is actually true. The compiler is slow but not due to memory safety; the 'cargo check' command is rather quick and the compiler itself doesn't seem to spend a lot of time in the frontend, most of the time in spent in the backend, past the borrow checking phrase.
      - pron 6y ago
        https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24302711 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24302711

pron 6y ago

> I don't think the runtime checks provide the same set of benefits. Of course not, but that doesn't mean Zig is less effective at achieving correctness. It just does so in a different way -- it trades sound guarantees for less sound ones and a simpler language with a faster cycle. Is one better than the other? Hard to say. Only empirical study could settle that.

fsociety 6y ago
I’d argue it does mean it is less effective at achieving correctness but the trade-off made is the whole point of Zig. Simple language that is really a better C.
- pron 6y ago
  It's hard to make a definitive argument one way or the other because the guarantees Rust makes come at a cost of compilation speed and language complexity that can have a negative effect on correctness. This question is impossible to answer without an empirical study. Unlike C, Zig is (or will be) memory safe, although its safety can be turned off, and often is -- after testing. Unlike C, it provides powerful abstraction capabilities similar to those of C++. The fact that it can do all that yet be very simple seems to suggest at first glance that it's "like C" but that's because we've never had a language like that before. Zig's simplicity is misleading. It turns out you can do a lot with a very simple language. We knew that to be true for high-level languages like Scheme, but Zig shows it's possible in low-level languages, too.
  - AsyncAwait 6y ago
    > It's hard to make a definitive argument one way or the other because the guarantees Rust makes come at a cost of compilation speed I don't think this is actually true. The compiler is slow but not due to memory safety; the 'cargo check' command is rather quick and the compiler itself doesn't seem to spend a lot of time in the frontend, most of the time in spent in the backend, past the borrow checking phrase.
    - pron 6y ago
      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24302711 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24302711