Re:Revisiting the design approach to Zig
by foldr on Wednesday September 07, 2022 @08:46AM
(#32749839)
It's not the end of the world, but there are significant disadvantages. For example, it makes it difficult for generic libraries to expose stable interfaces. The interface is 'use any type that doesn't make this exact implementation break', rather than (e.g.) 'use any type that implements these traits'. So you could potentially upgrade from v1.0.0 to v1.0.1 of a library and find that instantiating a generic function with a particular type no longer compiles. If you want to know why it doesn't compile, you'll just have to dig into the implementation of the library.
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Re:Revisiting the design approach to Zig
by skywal_l on Thursday September 08, 2022 @02:51PM
(#32770238)
Ok I get you. The absence of traits (or concept) make documentation and reading the API harder. You see a `comptime T` somewhere and you don't what is expected of this type unless you either read the code in full or just try your type and see if it compiles.
That's a valid point indeed and there's an issue for that: https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/1268