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Looking at the repo, the author seemed a little fed up [1] with the nature of lower level language and quitted. [1] https://github.com/asibahi/paella/blob/main

by fuhsnn 5mo ago

Looking at the repo, the author seemed a little fed up [1] with the nature of lower level language and quitted. [1] https://github.com/asibahi/paella/blob/main/writeup/c19.md#user-content-fn-month-f690d35c5c3bc8477be727677652c31f https://github.com/asibahi/paella/blob/main/writeup/c19.md#u...

dwroberts 5mo ago
Feels like maybe something lost in translation with their explanation - they say they were fed up of data structures etc. but they returned to Rust? I’m assuming there’s something a bit more nuanced about what they got tired of with Zig
- ecshafer 5mo ago
  I think Rust is "higher level" than C or Zig in the sense that there are most abstractions than C or Zig. Its not Javascript, but it is possible to program Rust without worrying too much about low level concerns.
  - flykespice 5mo ago
    Which is still a crazy claim considering Rust is often told about having strong bureaucracy around even sharing variables (borrow checker).
    - namr2000 5mo ago
      The languages trade complexity in different areas. Rust tries to prevent a class of problems that appear in almost all languages (i.e two threads mutating the same piece of data at the same time) via a strict type system and borrow checker. Zig won't do any of that but will force you to think about the allocator that you're using, when you need to free memory, the exact composition of your data structures, etc. Depending on the kind of programmer you are you may find one of these more difficult to work with than the other.
    - slopinthebag 5mo ago
      There are some cases in Rust where the borrow checker rejects valid programs, in those cases it may be because of a certain data structure in which case you probably have many crates available to solve the issue, or you can solve it yourself with boxing, cloning, or whatever. The vast majority of the time (imo) the borrow checker is just checking invariants you have to otherwise hold and maintain in your head, which is harder and more error prone. The actual hard part of Rust is dealing with async, especially when building libraries. But thats the cost of a zero-cost async abstraction I suppose.
  - Ygg2 5mo ago
    Except if you need to expose or consume a C API, or you need to use some obscure performance improvement.
    - Pay08 5mo ago
      Fuck it, by that logic C and Python are the same language.
  - NooneAtAll3 5mo ago
    > in the sense that there are most abstractions is it a typo for more abstractions? or is there some different meaning?
    - ecshafer 5mo ago
      yes its a typo
- namr2000 5mo ago
  Rust is a world away from Zig as far as being low-level. Rust does not have manual memory management and revolves around RAII which hides a great deal of complexity from you. Moreover it is not unusual for a Rust project to have 300+ dependencies that deal with data structures, synchronization, threading etc. Zig has a rich std lib, but is otherwise very bare and expects you to implement the things you actually want.
  - Ygg2 5mo ago
    This depends on what you mean by low level. Commonly it means, how much you need to take care about minute, low-level issues. In that way C, Rust, and Zig are about the same. Dependencies have nothing to do with low-level vs. high-level but just package management, how well the language composes, and how rich the standard library is. Are assumptions in package A able to affect package B. In C that's almost impossible to avoid, because different people have different ideas about how long their objects live. Having a rich standard library isn't just a pure positive. More code means more maintenance.
    - namr2000 5mo ago
      I agree with you that package management has nothing to do with how low-level a language is. That being said Rust is definitely a much higher level language than either C or Zig. The availability of `Arc` and `Box`, the existence and reliance on `drop`, and all of `async` are things that just wouldn't exist in Zig and allow Rust programmers to think at higher levels of abstraction when it comes to memory management. > Having a rich standard library isn't just a pure positive. More code means more maintenance. I would argue it's much worse to rely on packages that are not in the standard library since its harder to gain trust on maintenance and quality of the code you rely on. I do agree that more code is almost always just more of a burden though.
      - Ygg2 5mo ago
        > That being said Rust is definitely a much higher level language than either C or Zig. The availability of `Arc` and `Box`, the existence and reliance on `drop` I mean, C++ have RAII and stuff like unique pointer, does that make it higher level than Zig? And what if you don't use Arc or Box? Is your program now lower level than baseline Rust? As I said, depends a lot about what you mean by low level.
- mrkeen 5mo ago
  The author was fed up with not having data structures already provided, and needing to roll his own
  - dwroberts 5mo ago
    Not really understanding what this would be though, zig has all the basic stuff you would expect in its stdlib (hashmap, queues, lists etc) just like Rust
    - Pay08 5mo ago
      This is from last year, the stdlib was much more bare back then.
  - resonancel 5mo ago
    Then it's actually the immature zig ecosystem that rubbed the author the wrong way, not zig the language itself. Not that the ecosystem isn't important, but IMO a language only truly fails you when it doesn't offer the composability and performance characteristics necessary for your solution.
- slopinthebag 5mo ago
  While you can obviously write low level code in Rust and manage allocations, memory, use pointers etc, you can also write much higher level code leveraging abstractions both in Rust itself and its' rich ecosystem. If you're coming from higher level languages it's much friendlier than C/C++ or Zig. I think I would struggle to write C or Zig effectively but I have no issues with Rust and I really enjoy the language.
MatthiasPortzel 5mo ago
I’ve just read the two functions there by that footnote, `reaching_copies_meet`. I have so much code review feedback just on code style, before we even get into functionality. And it’s like 20 lines. (The function shouldn’t return an error set, it should take an allocator, the input parameter slices should be const, the function shouldn’t return either the input slice or a newly allocated slice.) It’s interesting how Zig clicked for me pretty quickly (although I have been writing it for a couple of years now). But some of the strategies of ownership and data oriented design I picked up writing JavaScript. Sometimes returning a new slice and sometimes returning the same slice is a problem for memory cleanup, but I wouldn’t do it even in JavaScript because it makes it difficult for the caller to know whether they can mutate the slice safely. I suspect that there’s a way to write this algorithm without allocating a temporary buffer for each iteration. If I’m right that it’s just intersecting N sets, then I would start by making a copy of the first set, and on each iteration, removing items that don’t appear in the new set. I suspect the author is frustrated that Zig doesn’t have an intersect primitive for arrays, but usually when the Zig standard library doesn’t have something, it’s intentionally pushing you to a different algorithm.
- z0ltan 5mo ago
  [dead]
zengid 5mo ago
Quite a footnote [0]: > I do not know if it is me being bored with the project, or annoyed with having to build and design a data structure, that has soured me on this project. But I have really at this point lost most motivation to continue this chapter. The way Zig is designed, it makes me deal with the data structure and memory management complexity head on, and it is tiresome. It is not "simpler" than, say, Rust: it just leaves the programmer to deal with the complexity, <strike-through>gaslighting the user</strike-through> claiming it is absolutely necessary. [0] https://github.com/asibahi/paella/blob/main/writeup/c19.md#user-content-fn-month-f690d35c5c3bc8477be727677652c31f https://github.com/asibahi/paella/blob/main/writeup/c19.md#u...

by fuhsnn 5mo ago

dwroberts 5mo ago

Feels like maybe something lost in translation with their explanation - they say they were fed up of data structures etc. but they returned to Rust? I’m assuming there’s something a bit more nuanced about what they got tired of with Zig

ecshafer 5mo ago
I think Rust is "higher level" than C or Zig in the sense that there are most abstractions than C or Zig. Its not Javascript, but it is possible to program Rust without worrying too much about low level concerns.
- flykespice 5mo ago
  Which is still a crazy claim considering Rust is often told about having strong bureaucracy around even sharing variables (borrow checker).
  - namr2000 5mo ago
    The languages trade complexity in different areas. Rust tries to prevent a class of problems that appear in almost all languages (i.e two threads mutating the same piece of data at the same time) via a strict type system and borrow checker. Zig won't do any of that but will force you to think about the allocator that you're using, when you need to free memory, the exact composition of your data structures, etc. Depending on the kind of programmer you are you may find one of these more difficult to work with than the other.
  - slopinthebag 5mo ago
    There are some cases in Rust where the borrow checker rejects valid programs, in those cases it may be because of a certain data structure in which case you probably have many crates available to solve the issue, or you can solve it yourself with boxing, cloning, or whatever. The vast majority of the time (imo) the borrow checker is just checking invariants you have to otherwise hold and maintain in your head, which is harder and more error prone. The actual hard part of Rust is dealing with async, especially when building libraries. But thats the cost of a zero-cost async abstraction I suppose.
- Ygg2 5mo ago
  Except if you need to expose or consume a C API, or you need to use some obscure performance improvement.
  - Pay08 5mo ago
    Fuck it, by that logic C and Python are the same language.
- NooneAtAll3 5mo ago
  > in the sense that there are most abstractions is it a typo for more abstractions? or is there some different meaning?
  - ecshafer 5mo ago
    yes its a typo
namr2000 5mo ago
Rust is a world away from Zig as far as being low-level. Rust does not have manual memory management and revolves around RAII which hides a great deal of complexity from you. Moreover it is not unusual for a Rust project to have 300+ dependencies that deal with data structures, synchronization, threading etc. Zig has a rich std lib, but is otherwise very bare and expects you to implement the things you actually want.
- Ygg2 5mo ago
  This depends on what you mean by low level. Commonly it means, how much you need to take care about minute, low-level issues. In that way C, Rust, and Zig are about the same. Dependencies have nothing to do with low-level vs. high-level but just package management, how well the language composes, and how rich the standard library is. Are assumptions in package A able to affect package B. In C that's almost impossible to avoid, because different people have different ideas about how long their objects live. Having a rich standard library isn't just a pure positive. More code means more maintenance.
  - namr2000 5mo ago
    I agree with you that package management has nothing to do with how low-level a language is. That being said Rust is definitely a much higher level language than either C or Zig. The availability of `Arc` and `Box`, the existence and reliance on `drop`, and all of `async` are things that just wouldn't exist in Zig and allow Rust programmers to think at higher levels of abstraction when it comes to memory management. > Having a rich standard library isn't just a pure positive. More code means more maintenance. I would argue it's much worse to rely on packages that are not in the standard library since its harder to gain trust on maintenance and quality of the code you rely on. I do agree that more code is almost always just more of a burden though.
    - Ygg2 5mo ago
      > That being said Rust is definitely a much higher level language than either C or Zig. The availability of `Arc` and `Box`, the existence and reliance on `drop` I mean, C++ have RAII and stuff like unique pointer, does that make it higher level than Zig? And what if you don't use Arc or Box? Is your program now lower level than baseline Rust? As I said, depends a lot about what you mean by low level.
mrkeen 5mo ago
The author was fed up with not having data structures already provided, and needing to roll his own
- dwroberts 5mo ago
  Not really understanding what this would be though, zig has all the basic stuff you would expect in its stdlib (hashmap, queues, lists etc) just like Rust
  - Pay08 5mo ago
    This is from last year, the stdlib was much more bare back then.
- resonancel 5mo ago
  Then it's actually the immature zig ecosystem that rubbed the author the wrong way, not zig the language itself. Not that the ecosystem isn't important, but IMO a language only truly fails you when it doesn't offer the composability and performance characteristics necessary for your solution.
slopinthebag 5mo ago
While you can obviously write low level code in Rust and manage allocations, memory, use pointers etc, you can also write much higher level code leveraging abstractions both in Rust itself and its' rich ecosystem. If you're coming from higher level languages it's much friendlier than C/C++ or Zig. I think I would struggle to write C or Zig effectively but I have no issues with Rust and I really enjoy the language.

MatthiasPortzel 5mo ago

I’ve just read the two functions there by that footnote, `reaching_copies_meet`. I have so much code review feedback just on code style, before we even get into functionality. And it’s like 20 lines. (The function shouldn’t return an error set, it should take an allocator, the input parameter slices should be const, the function shouldn’t return either the input slice or a newly allocated slice.) It’s interesting how Zig clicked for me pretty quickly (although I have been writing it for a couple of years now). But some of the strategies of ownership and data oriented design I picked up writing JavaScript. Sometimes returning a new slice and sometimes returning the same slice is a problem for memory cleanup, but I wouldn’t do it even in JavaScript because it makes it difficult for the caller to know whether they can mutate the slice safely. I suspect that there’s a way to write this algorithm without allocating a temporary buffer for each iteration. If I’m right that it’s just intersecting N sets, then I would start by making a copy of the first set, and on each iteration, removing items that don’t appear in the new set. I suspect the author is frustrated that Zig doesn’t have an intersect primitive for arrays, but usually when the Zig standard library doesn’t have something, it’s intentionally pushing you to a different algorithm.

z0ltan 5mo ago
[dead]

zengid 5mo ago

Quite a footnote [0]: > I do not know if it is me being bored with the project, or annoyed with having to build and design a data structure, that has soured me on this project. But I have really at this point lost most motivation to continue this chapter. The way Zig is designed, it makes me deal with the data structure and memory management complexity head on, and it is tiresome. It is not "simpler" than, say, Rust: it just leaves the programmer to deal with the complexity, <strike-through>gaslighting the user</strike-through> claiming it is absolutely necessary. [0] https://github.com/asibahi/paella/blob/main/writeup/c19.md#user-content-fn-month-f690d35c5c3bc8477be727677652c31f https://github.com/asibahi/paella/blob/main/writeup/c19.md#u...