chaz72

The comment he is responding to expresses contempt for Zig’s LLM policy, and does so in a thread that is unrelated to Zig’s LLM policy. I think he’s showing some frustration here, but frankly I get it. Would anybody like to comment on the post?

I think all he’s saying is ‘feel free to use LLMs however you like, that isn’t related to how we use them on our project’. (I have no affiliation to Loris or the Zig project, just offering a suggested translation.)

No worries, I take your word for the status of these in Rust and I don’t need those features in my own Zig comptime code which as I said in a different comment, has been very predictable over the last few years. Thanks for explaining though!

> Ideally f(x) means the same thing whether evaluated by the compiler or by the generated program.

Absolutely, that’s why I wanted to know what types of things aren’t covered yet, and that’s also why I don’t share your certainty that they won’t be resolved later.

I hear you but I’m not sure it’s as dramatic as that, it’s also been quite predictable in my use over the last few years since I haven’t happened to use floating point or different endianness.

I get it now. Important things but not things that I use often - hopefully addressed by 1.0.

Now I see this response, I responded to the other comment.

Interesting, I hadn’t run across that but that’s probably just my problem domain. I did find this bug that looks like it was resolved a year ago https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/24184 and I have also read they are doing some other work on floating point that will hopefully address other cross-platform inconsistencies.

And they believe Zig comptime wouldn’t do that? For the same inputs? I’d love an example.

Are you saying that you think that Zig does not produce identical outcomes for comptime code regardless of when the code runs? What do you mean?

Regardless of focusing on correctness or performance, it looks to me like the author didn’t understand arenas that well.

Like the other commenter said, “You use an arena when you have computation that might consume a bunch of scratch memory, and then you want to free all of that memory at once when the computation is done.” That’s the entire point of arenas.

My reasoning, which you may not agree with, is that I think that I have seen pron say unkind words before and I thought I had a better chance of persuading Steve to let it go. (Sorry pron, that’s how I was thinking of it. No, I have no specific examples.)

The fact is that every thread about Zig is filled with this kind of battle, and I’m tired of it, and it doesn’t represent any community, it’s so much worse on HN than anywhere else, and it’s all just defensiveness and crap.

I do see that you often have kind words for Zig and some attempt to more precisely define the differences.

What I mean is a bit different though, it’s that these arguments you get drawn into end up drowning out any real discussion of Zig’s progress. I don’t think that’s your intent but it is frustrating. I should be clear, I don’t think it’s wrong for you to defend yourself from accusations etc., I just wish it didn’t look like this.

I wonder how much better HN would be if they took a page from other forum systems that said “you know what, this whole branch of stuff should be moved over here and renamed so the original topic can move on”.

Sorry, all this may be unhelpful, I don’t know where the line should be, I’m just thinking out loud about the problem.

Yes! I think Fil is great so far but I think as he gets a bigger audience he should, well, consider that and focus on clarity a little more than humor. You can see Andrew’s growth in that respect.

Rust folks, this whole thing is a thread about Zig’s new feature - not even a memory safety-related feature! - and we cannot spend the whole damn time talking about Rust.

Steve, even you - I don’t believe I have ever seen you say an unkind word. But have you considered that it may be unkind to have written more than half of the words on a thread about a Zig performance feature?

If you choose to build static or dynamic libraries, I expect you’d still get to do that, and I expect as long as those don’t change and only the main binary needs patching it’d work the same. (Though I’m waiting for the next tagged release to really try it out myself, so that’s not like a guarantee or anything.)

I know this is mostly a joke but I have seriously wondered if “no hidden behavior” made it easier to port from Zig. Like, regardless of how easy or successful the port was in general, I think Zig’s explicitness may have worked in its favor.

I don’t disagree.

I responded to “clearly an anti-rust statement”, which is a bit of a stretch.

“Focus on debugging your application rather than debugging your programming language knowledge” to me sounds like it is directed primarily at C and C++., it’s a much more direct translation.

My specific reply was to laszlojamf saying “it seems like go, but with manual allocation”.

To your point though, if Rust is getting it done, go for it. A lot of people still write those in C though.

I think Zig would do better than Go at things like kernels, drivers, game engines, lower level sorts of things. Edited to add the obvious: SPIR-V, for instance.

Of course there’s lots of programming that can afford to pay for GC side effects, if there weren’t we wouldn’t have invented GC, but it’s a little less universal, a little less ‘system’.

For me, I came to Zig after horrible cross-platform experiences led me to try going all the way back to C and I found that I was spending way too much time learning to deal with accidental complexity instead of essential complexity. (Respect to the C masters but I failed to adapt.)

My interpretation of what they said is closer to “we already improved compilation speeds by 4x and we did it without compromising our plans to go much further - also this PR introduces specific timing bugs.”

Apples and oranges, yeah. I should have spelled that out more, thanks.

My guess is that one of these (Andrew) is measuring syscalls and the other is measuring vtable indirections.

Seriously, turn on the news once in a while.

That’s what I am betting on - but it isn’t 1.0 yet, and that matters too.

This is great! https://github.com/undergroundwires/privacy.sexy/tree/master... looks like the raw data (yaml) for all these commands, including commands for macOS. With that, it’s at least plausible to audit these commands.

I probably still won’t trust it on a critical system without a reputable audit though, I think I’d still prefer to either trust Microsoft or Apple or go run OpenBSD or Linux instead.

Yes! I try to always phrase it as "the part I can see from here will take at least X time".

Okay, so your source is Giuliani. Well that is an answer, I guess. Sorry I was looking for a news source and not a political one. This is not nearly as credible - until evidence reaches a courtroom - as “somebody on the internet”.

Never heard of this source - I hope it’s okay in this time of misinformation to ask for a recognizable source?

Edit: I mean I am okay with leaving it as “somebody on the internet says”, but wondered if the evidence was more clear than that.

Then you can definitely name one.