4 ms·

Something I really appreciate about Zig is its "colorblind async/await" [0]. To my eyes, it's the best of both worlds. It doesn't require a GC like Go's "conti

Something I really appreciate about Zig is its "colorblind async/await" [0]. To my eyes, it's the best of both worlds. It doesn't require a GC like Go's "contiguous stacks" approach [1] or Loom's approach [2]. It also doesn't require coloring like Javascript/Rust's async/await approach, which can sometimes seem like a viral leaky abstraction, causing incidental complexity in the presence of certain patterns. The main catch is around recursion, but that's not so bad, as Zig as a whole seems to steer users away from recursion anyway, with another interesting feature that detects it at compile time. I think new languages should be going this direction: focus on making things easier for the user, avoid causing incidental complexity, and keep abstractions zero-cost. Just my two cents! [0] https://kristoff.it/blog/zig-colorblind-async-await/ https://kristoff.it/blog/zig-colorblind-async-await/ [1] https://medium.com/a-journey-with-go/go-how-does-the-goroutine-stack-size-evolve-447fc02085e5 https://medium.com/a-journey-with-go/go-how-does-the-gorouti... [2] https://youtu.be/NV46KFV1m-4 https://youtu.be/NV46KFV1m-4

pharmakom 4y ago
Not familiar with Zig but doesn’t colourblindness lose you control over the binding points of the computation? This can be key for optimisation.
layer8 4y ago
It arguably isn’t fully colorblind: https://gavinhoward.com/2022/04/i-believe-zig-has-function-colors/ https://gavinhoward.com/2022/04/i-believe-zig-has-function-c...
- kbd 4y ago
  The mistake that article makes (imo) is that "colorblindness" means at compile-time. i.e. you don't have to define both a sync and an async version of a function. Obviously async vs sync have different representations at run time.
  - layer8 4y ago
    Definitions aside I’d say that it seems to be a leaky abstraction.
    - throwawaymaths 4y ago
      As someone who has used this (to enable a single function to be called either preemptively or cooperatively by a surrounding VM)... It's not leaky. To be frank, until you've actually done it, it's hard to see.
      - layer8 4y ago
        Section 4 of the article I linked demonstrates how it’s leaky. Admittedly just in special scenarios, but it means that the mechanism isn’t fully transparent.
- a1369209993 4y ago
  Actually, I think "colorblind" is good term for this: zig indisputably has function color (as the article demonstrates), but you can't see it.
- anonymoushn 4y ago
  Here's a working version of the program gavinhoward was trying to write: https://gist.github.com/sharpobject/49bd88416e68606d7812d609831cc8ae https://gist.github.com/sharpobject/49bd88416e68606d7812d609...
AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
Something I appreciate about the implementation is that the suspend/resume primitives make it nigh-trivial to write co-routines, which saved me several nanoseconds per frame in my toy Gigatron emulator's VGA decoding implementation and took a fraction of the time to write and debug compared to the traditional struct-based state machine I wrote first.

pharmakom 4y ago

Not familiar with Zig but doesn’t colourblindness lose you control over the binding points of the computation? This can be key for optimisation.

layer8 4y ago

It arguably isn’t fully colorblind: https://gavinhoward.com/2022/04/i-believe-zig-has-function-colors/ https://gavinhoward.com/2022/04/i-believe-zig-has-function-c...

kbd 4y ago
The mistake that article makes (imo) is that "colorblindness" means at compile-time. i.e. you don't have to define both a sync and an async version of a function. Obviously async vs sync have different representations at run time.
- layer8 4y ago
  Definitions aside I’d say that it seems to be a leaky abstraction.
  - throwawaymaths 4y ago
    As someone who has used this (to enable a single function to be called either preemptively or cooperatively by a surrounding VM)... It's not leaky. To be frank, until you've actually done it, it's hard to see.
    - layer8 4y ago
      Section 4 of the article I linked demonstrates how it’s leaky. Admittedly just in special scenarios, but it means that the mechanism isn’t fully transparent.
a1369209993 4y ago
Actually, I think "colorblind" is good term for this: zig indisputably has function color (as the article demonstrates), but you can't see it.
anonymoushn 4y ago
Here's a working version of the program gavinhoward was trying to write: https://gist.github.com/sharpobject/49bd88416e68606d7812d609831cc8ae https://gist.github.com/sharpobject/49bd88416e68606d7812d609...

AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago

Something I appreciate about the implementation is that the suspend/resume primitives make it nigh-trivial to write co-routines, which saved me several nanoseconds per frame in my toy Gigatron emulator's VGA decoding implementation and took a fraction of the time to write and debug compared to the traditional struct-based state machine I wrote first.