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Could you point to areas where you see Rust's support of the C ABI as being less than adequate than Zig? I haven't used Zig but have read about it, and am unawa

Could you point to areas where you see Rust's support of the C ABI as being less than adequate than Zig? I haven't used Zig but have read about it, and am unaware of where it has improvements over Rust in this area. The specific issues I personally have run into with Rust and the C ABI are varargs (possible just not simple) and then dealing with function interfaces defined through CPP macros. Are there others you've seen?

abnercoimbre 6y ago
Zig is a C compiler [0]: "Not only can Zig compile C code, but there is a very good reason to use Zig as a C compiler: Zig ships with libc" This is what I mean by properly absorbing C. Below that section, you'll also read: "One of the primary use cases for Zig is exporting a library with the C ABI for other programming languages to call into." It is unclear that Rust has shown that level of public commitment. And hey, one could argue that this stuff doesn't matter: Go famously tried to change its calling conventions. Their functions like to return at least three words, but C-based ABIs reserve at most two registers for function results, forcing Go to have their function return values on the stack. [0] https://ziglang.org/#Zig-is-also-a-C-compiler https://ziglang.org/#Zig-is-also-a-C-compiler
- bluejekyll 6y ago
  Thanks. I didn’t actually realize Zig is itself a C compiler. Rust has pretty great support for the C ABI based on my usage. Using both the bindgen and the cbindgen tools to import/export C ABI, is really simple. The Rust language is committed to always supporting the C ABI, where functions and types are marked as such, for example: 'extern "C" fn', and for types '#[repr(C)]' Thank you for the links to Zig.
  - AndyKelley 6y ago
    There's nothing stopping Rust from doing exactly what Zig does with also being a C compiler. It's not so much a language feature as it is a compiler feature. In fact you might even say that Zig paved the way for Rust to do exactly this. I think it's pretty in line with the goals of the project and I wouldn't be surprised if they decided to go for it. It's pretty fun because Rust was a huge inspiration for Zig, and so for it to turn around and then offer improvements back to Rust is a beautiful cycle :)

abnercoimbre 6y ago

Zig is a C compiler [0]: "Not only can Zig compile C code, but there is a very good reason to use Zig as a C compiler: Zig ships with libc" This is what I mean by properly absorbing C. Below that section, you'll also read: "One of the primary use cases for Zig is exporting a library with the C ABI for other programming languages to call into." It is unclear that Rust has shown that level of public commitment. And hey, one could argue that this stuff doesn't matter: Go famously tried to change its calling conventions. Their functions like to return at least three words, but C-based ABIs reserve at most two registers for function results, forcing Go to have their function return values on the stack. [0] https://ziglang.org/#Zig-is-also-a-C-compiler https://ziglang.org/#Zig-is-also-a-C-compiler

bluejekyll 6y ago
Thanks. I didn’t actually realize Zig is itself a C compiler. Rust has pretty great support for the C ABI based on my usage. Using both the bindgen and the cbindgen tools to import/export C ABI, is really simple. The Rust language is committed to always supporting the C ABI, where functions and types are marked as such, for example: 'extern "C" fn', and for types '#[repr(C)]' Thank you for the links to Zig.
- AndyKelley 6y ago
  There's nothing stopping Rust from doing exactly what Zig does with also being a C compiler. It's not so much a language feature as it is a compiler feature. In fact you might even say that Zig paved the way for Rust to do exactly this. I think it's pretty in line with the goals of the project and I wouldn't be surprised if they decided to go for it. It's pretty fun because Rust was a huge inspiration for Zig, and so for it to turn around and then offer improvements back to Rust is a beautiful cycle :)