libxev VS kv-bash

It scales to complex examples as well. Retained memory would be handled with its own allocator: for a large data structure like an LRU cache, one would initialize it with a pointer to the allocator, and use that internally to manage the memory.

Blocking (or rather, non-blocking, which is clearly what you meant) IO is a different story. Zig had an async system, but it had problems and got removed a couple point releases ago. There's libxev[0] for evented programs, from Mitchell Hashimoto. It's not mature yet but it offers a good solution to single-threaded concurrency and non-blocking IO.

I don't think Zig is the best choice for multithreaded programs, however, unless they're carefully engineered to share little to no memory (using message passing, for instance). You'd have to take care of locking and atomic ops manually, and unlike memory bugs, Zig doesn't have a lot of built-in support for catching problems with that.

A language with manual memory allocation isn't going to be the language of choice for writing web servers, for pretty obvious reasons. But for an application like squeezing the best performance out of a resource-constrained environment, the tradeoffs start to make sense.

[0]: https://github.com/mitchellh/libxev

io_uring support is obviously great & excellent, fulfills the "high performance" part well.

i was not expecting "Wasm + WASI" support at all. that's very cool. implementation is wasi_poll.zig (https://github.com/mitchellh/libxev/blob/main/src/backend/wa...). not to be unkind, but this makes me wonder very much if WASI is already missing the mark, if polling is the solution offered.

gotta say, this is some very understandable clean code. further enhancing my sense that i really ought be playing with zig.

You might be interested in a pure Zig implementation of these primitives by Mitchell in his libxev library: https://github.com/mitchellh/libxev

https://github.com/mitchellh/libxev

- one from the Tigerbeetle DB

In a way I feel that everything is an alternative to everything and at the same time nothing is.

As you said it all depends on the circumstances. But I don't really see Zig competing with Go. They both can do mostly the same things, but they both approach them from quite a different sides.

For example bash is being used in:

- gaming (https://github.com/JosefZIla/bash2048)

- web apps (https://github.com/avleen/bashttpd)

- networking

- CLIs

- distributed systems (https://github.com/frameable/aviary.sh)

- crypto (https://armedia.com/blog/blockchain-program-written-bash/ https://github.com/grondilu/bitcoin-bash-tools)

- systems programming (https://github.com/damphat/kv-bash)

- language tooling

Some of those make more sense than others. However we all talk about a mythical general case. For every language there are niches that are covered by it more significantly. For Go it would probably be web backend. It doesn't mean it is only suited to this one niche, it is used in everything. In general it is used there more. I don't believe that Rust sees the most use in the same niche to the same order that Go sees it.

Is Rust or Zig an alternative to php, awk or Lisp? In practice I don't really think so.

I guess it all depends on one's definition of "alternative". I don't think that a statistical Go programmer would see Zig as a real alternative. Statistical C programmer might see it as a Go alternative, but that probably would not be a question he would ask.