Re:Revisiting the design approach to Zig
by karmakaze on Tuesday September 06, 2022 @10:30AM
(#32737578)
I watched the video rather than read the short post. It did a good job getting into details that illustrate some of the tradeoffs. e.g. Do you want a small language that you can fully learn, or do you want a language with many features that you can spend time learning?
Other things that are made explicit such as specifying an allocator on every allocation is an inconvenience that you pay for that flexibility. The choice of safety being added rather than assumed and later satisfied or declared an unsafe area is vastly different with a tradeoff in how developers use the language. An example given was how the self-hosted complier can use cache optimized untagged unions with the tags in a separate array.
If I had to guess what the single biggest pattern of tradeoffs is, I'd say it's about being explicit rather than implicit. You gain fine-grained control at the cost of brevity/convenience.
Other things that are made explicit such as specifying an allocator on every allocation is an inconvenience that you pay for that flexibility. The choice of safety being added rather than assumed and later satisfied or declared an unsafe area is vastly different with a tradeoff in how developers use the language. An example given was how the self-hosted complier can use cache optimized untagged unions with the tags in a separate array.
If I had to guess what the single biggest pattern of tradeoffs is, I'd say it's about being explicit rather than implicit. You gain fine-grained control at the cost of brevity/convenience.