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> Zig has a pretty good memory safety story No, Zig is simply not memory safe. That's a property of a programming language that has a definition. Zig does not

> Zig has a pretty good memory safety story No, Zig is simply not memory safe. That's a property of a programming language that has a definition. Zig does not meet that definition. > I find it funny that fans of a language of a not-so-young-age that is struggling to find relevance and capture even 1% of the market are treating it as such an inevitability that it's irresponsible to talk about anything else. Leaving aside your weird description of a language powering software that serves billions of users as "struggling to find relevance", most software in 2022 is written in languages that are memory safe. Zig is quite the outlier here. It would in fact be very reasonable to survey the landscape of popular languages today and come to the conclusion that memory safety is an inevitability. > It's also detached from reality, as much of the software we all depend on is being written, in 2022, in languages without sound memory safety guarantees. Virtually all of that software is being developed in C or C++. The most compelling reason to use those languages is that they have a huge install base and a huge amount of code already written in them. This says nothing about whether a brand-new language should be memory safe. > There are various approaches being tried for how we should write low-level programs in the future, but there is no consensus yet on the best one. No, there actually is PL consensus that all new languages should be memory-safe, maybe aside from very low-level specialized languages, which Zig is not trying to be--Zig is trying to be a general purpose language.

pron 4y ago
> No, Zig is simply not memory safe. I didn't claim that it is. I said it has a good memory safety story, i.e. mechanisms that soundly guarantee some kinds of memory safety, plus a design that helps write correct programs. Correctness in general, and memory safety in particular, are very central concerns in Zig's design, it's just that its story isn't one of sound guarantees across the board but, rather, some balanced mix of approaches -- some based on soundness, others based on facilitating comprehension and easier testing. > Most software in 2022 is written in languages that are memory safe. Zig is quite the outlier here. No, Zig is a low-level language, and the vast majority of low-level programs in 2022 are written in languages whose memory-safety story is worse than Zig's. > This says nothing about whether a brand-new language should be memory safe. That's right. We don't yet have an answer to that question, because we don't yet have sufficient experience with low-level languages that do have sound memory safety guarantees. I mean, it sure is better to have more guarantees if they come for free, but there's no such option in front of us just yet. > No, there actually is PL consensus that all new languages should be memory-safe No, there really isn't one when it comes to low-level languages (and the interest in Zig is proof that there is no consensus that it shouldn't exist). Rust is a low level language with sound memory safety guarantees, which comes at a price that makes it unappealing for some, and so various other approaches are being tried as well. You can't insist there's consensus when clearly there are people who disagree with you. That's the definition of a lack of consensus. I also think it is premature, to say the least, to declare an approach that is currently still far from proving a success as the only way.
- pcwalton 4y ago
  > I didn't claim that it is. I said it has a good memory safety story, i.e. mechanisms that soundly guarantee some kinds of memory safety, as well as a design that makes it relatively easy to help write correct programs. Zig doesn't have mechanisms that soundly guarantee some kinds of memory safety. It's not spacially memory safe: extern unions, sentinel-terminated pointers, and multi-element pointers break it. At best, we think there's probably some subset of Zig that you could define that is spacially memory safe. (This isn't a particularly interesting property because it's trivially true for any language, by the way: C without pointers and without arrays is a subset of C that's memory safe, for instance, and also uninteresting.) > No, Zig is a low-level language, and the vast majority of low-level programs in 2022 are written in languages whose memory-safety story is worse than Zig's. Zig claims to be a general-purpose language, not just a low-level one. From [1]: "Zig is a general-purpose programming language and toolchain for maintaining robust, optimal, and reusable software." > I mean, it sure is better to have more guarantees if they come for free, but there's no such option in front of us just yet. It's better to have more guarantees if the benefit of the guarantees outweighs the cost, not if there is no cost. For example, for many apps, the benefit of memory safety outweighs the cost of a garbage collector. > You can't insist there's consensus when clearly there are people who disagree with you. That's the definition of a lack of consensus. Consensus doesn't mean that nobody disagrees. It means that the opposite position is a fringe view. [1]: https://ziglang.org/documentation/master/ https://ziglang.org/documentation/master/
  - pron 4y ago
    > Zig doesn't have mechanisms that soundly guarantee some kinds of memory safety. It does. > It's not spacially memory safe: extern unions, sentinel-terminated pointers, and multi-element pointers break it. We've been through that. Those are syntactically delineated unsafe features for C/hardware interop. Rust has them, too. > This isn't a particularly interesting property because it's trivially true for any language That's right, but Zig is much closer to Rust than to C in that regard. It has clearly marked unsafe features for C or hardware interop, which aren't used in other situations and could be mechanically excluded -- just as in Rust. > Zig claims to be a general-purpose language, not just a low-level one. Surely you agree it's also a low-level language? > It's better to have more guarantees if the benefit of the guarantees outweighs the cost, not if there is no cost. Yep, and we don't know if we're there in low level languages. So far it seems that some people find the cost of Rust acceptable and others do not. In other words, there's no consensus on what the acceptable cost is. > It means that the opposite position is a fringe view. So disagreeing that the only right design is that of a language that's struggling to get 1% of the market is a fringe view? That's like a Haskeller declaring that it is a fringe view to disagree that non-strict pure functional programming is the only right way to write programs. I think that Odin and JAI, two other low level languages in development, also don't go down the full memory-safety soundness path. Seems to me to be quite far from a fringe view. If people aren't buying what Rust is selling -- regardless of how strongly some feel about the justice of its approach -- I think that those of us who care about correctness must explore alternatives, and Zig is certainly a fascinating alternative. It might well be the case that neither Rust nor Zig succeed in the market, but even in that case, both can certainly serve as inspiration for the languages that follow.

pron 4y ago

> No, Zig is simply not memory safe. I didn't claim that it is. I said it has a good memory safety story, i.e. mechanisms that soundly guarantee some kinds of memory safety, plus a design that helps write correct programs. Correctness in general, and memory safety in particular, are very central concerns in Zig's design, it's just that its story isn't one of sound guarantees across the board but, rather, some balanced mix of approaches -- some based on soundness, others based on facilitating comprehension and easier testing. > Most software in 2022 is written in languages that are memory safe. Zig is quite the outlier here. No, Zig is a low-level language, and the vast majority of low-level programs in 2022 are written in languages whose memory-safety story is worse than Zig's. > This says nothing about whether a brand-new language should be memory safe. That's right. We don't yet have an answer to that question, because we don't yet have sufficient experience with low-level languages that do have sound memory safety guarantees. I mean, it sure is better to have more guarantees if they come for free, but there's no such option in front of us just yet. > No, there actually is PL consensus that all new languages should be memory-safe No, there really isn't one when it comes to low-level languages (and the interest in Zig is proof that there is no consensus that it shouldn't exist). Rust is a low level language with sound memory safety guarantees, which comes at a price that makes it unappealing for some, and so various other approaches are being tried as well. You can't insist there's consensus when clearly there are people who disagree with you. That's the definition of a lack of consensus. I also think it is premature, to say the least, to declare an approach that is currently still far from proving a success as the only way.

pcwalton 4y ago
> I didn't claim that it is. I said it has a good memory safety story, i.e. mechanisms that soundly guarantee some kinds of memory safety, as well as a design that makes it relatively easy to help write correct programs. Zig doesn't have mechanisms that soundly guarantee some kinds of memory safety. It's not spacially memory safe: extern unions, sentinel-terminated pointers, and multi-element pointers break it. At best, we think there's probably some subset of Zig that you could define that is spacially memory safe. (This isn't a particularly interesting property because it's trivially true for any language, by the way: C without pointers and without arrays is a subset of C that's memory safe, for instance, and also uninteresting.) > No, Zig is a low-level language, and the vast majority of low-level programs in 2022 are written in languages whose memory-safety story is worse than Zig's. Zig claims to be a general-purpose language, not just a low-level one. From [1]: "Zig is a general-purpose programming language and toolchain for maintaining robust, optimal, and reusable software." > I mean, it sure is better to have more guarantees if they come for free, but there's no such option in front of us just yet. It's better to have more guarantees if the benefit of the guarantees outweighs the cost, not if there is no cost. For example, for many apps, the benefit of memory safety outweighs the cost of a garbage collector. > You can't insist there's consensus when clearly there are people who disagree with you. That's the definition of a lack of consensus. Consensus doesn't mean that nobody disagrees. It means that the opposite position is a fringe view. [1]: https://ziglang.org/documentation/master/ https://ziglang.org/documentation/master/
- pron 4y ago
  > Zig doesn't have mechanisms that soundly guarantee some kinds of memory safety. It does. > It's not spacially memory safe: extern unions, sentinel-terminated pointers, and multi-element pointers break it. We've been through that. Those are syntactically delineated unsafe features for C/hardware interop. Rust has them, too. > This isn't a particularly interesting property because it's trivially true for any language That's right, but Zig is much closer to Rust than to C in that regard. It has clearly marked unsafe features for C or hardware interop, which aren't used in other situations and could be mechanically excluded -- just as in Rust. > Zig claims to be a general-purpose language, not just a low-level one. Surely you agree it's also a low-level language? > It's better to have more guarantees if the benefit of the guarantees outweighs the cost, not if there is no cost. Yep, and we don't know if we're there in low level languages. So far it seems that some people find the cost of Rust acceptable and others do not. In other words, there's no consensus on what the acceptable cost is. > It means that the opposite position is a fringe view. So disagreeing that the only right design is that of a language that's struggling to get 1% of the market is a fringe view? That's like a Haskeller declaring that it is a fringe view to disagree that non-strict pure functional programming is the only right way to write programs. I think that Odin and JAI, two other low level languages in development, also don't go down the full memory-safety soundness path. Seems to me to be quite far from a fringe view. If people aren't buying what Rust is selling -- regardless of how strongly some feel about the justice of its approach -- I think that those of us who care about correctness must explore alternatives, and Zig is certainly a fascinating alternative. It might well be the case that neither Rust nor Zig succeed in the market, but even in that case, both can certainly serve as inspiration for the languages that follow.