duf VS zig

Not sure these are really popular, but I cannot resist advertising a few utilities written in Go that I regularly use in my daily workflow:

- gdu: a NCDU clone, much faster on SSD mounts [1]

- duf: a `df` clone with a nicer interface [2]

- massren: a `vidir` clone (simpler to use but with fewer options) [3]

- gotop: a `top` clone [4]

- micro: a nice TUI editor [5]

Building this kind of tools in Go makes sense, as the executables are statically compiled and are thus easy to install on remote servers.

[1]: https://github.com/dundee/gdu

[2]: https://github.com/muesli/duf

[3]: https://github.com/laurent22/massren

[4]: https://github.com/xxxserxxx/gotop

[5]: https://github.com/zyedidia/micro

Somewhat related - `duf` is "a better `df` alternative":

https://github.com/muesli/duf

I'm normally using duf but this looks pretty neat.

Otherwise the last option is to get the deb/appimage files from their official git repos or website, like for my use cases, MongoDB Compass (which was not officially maintained on flatpak) or duf (not available in Ubuntu repos)

duf

What cool CLI tools do you know, that are do something faster than regular commands, and do something useful? For example: https://github.com/muesli/duf.

duf - Disk Usage/Free Utility - a better 'df' alternative.

When writing code in a scripting language, sometimes you need that extra bit of performance (or maybe an async feature from Zig).

NodeJS is by no means a slow runtime, it wouldn’t be so popular if it was. But compared to Bun, it’s slow. Bun was built from the ground up with speed in mind, using both JavascriptCore and Zig. The Bun team spent an enormous amount of time and energy trying to make Bun fast, including lots of profiling, benchmarking, and optimizations.

ntdll.dll!RtlUserThreadStart()

There are valid reasons to use APIs from NTDLL. Where I disagree with zig#1840 is the idea that it is always better to use NTDLL versions of API. Every other software ecosystem uses the standard Win32 APIs and diverging from that without a good reason seems like a good way to have unexpected behavior. One concrete example is most users and programmers expect Windows to redirect some file system paths when running on WOW64. But this is implemented in Kernel32, not ntdll.

https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/11894

Zig also has an IRC channel on libera (#zig) that is moderated by Andrew Kelley.[1]

[1] https://github.com/ziglang/zig/wiki/Community

1. ZIG - $103,611

ESP32 and STM32 support is very welcome!

I have been following https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/5467 for a while and progress seemed to have slowed significantly

I have never used it directly, take what I say with a grain of salt.

As far as I know at least part of the idea was to eliminate the function coloring problem by letting the compiler do some nifty compile-time deductions. This had some issues (I don't know if this is still planned, it seems like the kind of thing that should not work in practice). Additionally, there were all sorts of hard technical issues with LLVM, debugging, etc.

I recommend checking the issue tracker, eg. https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/6025

I personally don't understand the domain well enough at all, but honestly, I feel like (if possible) Zig should try to double down on its allocator approach.

Instead of trying to use some compile-time deduction magic explicitly pass around an "async runtime/executor" struct which you explicitly have to interact with. Why not?

Yes, fundamentally. In Rust if you take a parameter of generic type T without any bounds, you cannot call anything on it except for things which are defined for all types. If you specify bounds, only things required by the bounds can be called (+ the ones for all types). Another difference is where you get an error when you try pass something which doesn't adhere to a certain trait. In Rust you will get an error at the call site, not at the place of use (except if you don't specify any bounds).

Zig is doing just fine without any trait mechanism and it simplifies the language a lot but it does come up from time to time. The usual solution is to just get type information via @typeInfo and error out if the type is something you're not expecting [0]. Not everybody is happy about it though [1] because, among other things, it makes it more difficult to discover what the required type actually is.

[0] https://github.com/ziglang/zig/blob/b3aed4e2c8b4d48b8b12f606...

[1] https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/17198