libxo VS zig

> In FreeBSD, this problem was solved with libxo[0]:

Libxo happens to be in the base system, but it is generally available:

* https://github.com/Juniper/libxo

* https://libxo.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

Or make it flexible:

> libxo - A Library for Generating Text, XML, JSON, and HTML Output

* https://github.com/Juniper/libxo/

* https://wiki.freebsd.org/LibXo

Want structure? Ask for JSON or XML and parse. Otherwise it's the regular text output.

Can you trust it? Cli tool output is not exactly stable. I thought that's why libxo exists?

https://github.com/Juniper/libxo

Please consider https://github.com/Juniper/libxo or something even better than that.

That would look a lot like FreeBSD. Many of the FreeBSD userland tools are set up to use the excellent libxo (https://github.com/Juniper/libxo) to allow the user's choice of how things are output.

Actually, nobody.

Here is the commit where Reader/Writer was introduced: https://github.com/ziglang/zig/commit/5e212db29cf9e2c06aba36...

This is a few months after `git init`. You can see I was really just working on the parser, with a toy example to get things started.

Over time, I merged contributions that made minor changes and shuffled things around, and these APIs evolved to kind of work okay. But nobody really considered "the Zig IO stack" as a whole and put in design effort. That is happening for the first time right now.

This list's Zig as an entry, despite the Zig project having very clear plans[0] for a 1.0 release. That's not 0ver, it's just the beta stage of semver.

[0] https://github.com/ziglang/zig/milestone/2

I usually structure teaching the same way done in https://www.writethedocs.org/videos/eu/2017/the-four-kinds-o.... So "the Quick Walkthrough Guide will explain what dk scripts are and give you small examples to run" is simply a learning-oriented tutorial which is mostly about giving students confidence and visual feedback. And simultaneously it an explanation of nothing (the video has a great explanation for why to do that). So, I agree that an explanation of threads + Internet + cross-compilation would quite nuts, but for an experienced developer I'd expect to see a meaty example (take a look at https://ziglang.org/ for comparison).

One concrete action may be to make two distinct Quick Start guides ... one for the experienced and one for the inexperienced students though. Is that your thinking?

> I feel like I can write powerful code in any language, but the goal is to write code for a framework that is most future proof, so that you can maintain modular stuff for decades.

I like Zig a lot, but long-term maintainability and modularity is one of its weakest points IMHO.

Zig is hostile to encapsulation. You cannot make struct members private: https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/9909#issuecomment-9426...

Key quote:

> The idea of private fields and getter/setter methods was popularized by Java, but it is an anti-pattern. Fields are there; they exist. They are the data that underpins any abstraction. My recommendation is to name fields carefully and leave them as part of the public API, carefully documenting what they do.

You cannot reasonably form API contracts (which are the foundation of software modularity) unless you can hide the internal representation. You need to be able to change the internal representation without breaking users. I hope Zig reverses this decision someday and supports private fields.

> Did Zig really do that?

https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/544#issuecomment-61807...

> In order to simplify everything, tabs are not allowed. Spaces are necessary; we can't ban spaces.

They seem to be open to the alternative but not to a solution that isn't forced on people:

> Maybe someday, we'll switch to tabs for indentation, spaces for alignment and make it a compile error if they are incorrectly mixed

Zig already has a builtin code formatter that automatically changes formatting to their preference, but that's not enough.

Zig solved this by not having a string type at all and not shipping full Unicode support in std: https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/234#issuecomment-27630....

Bun is written from scratch in Zig, a low-level language focused on performance and safety. Instead of using V8 (the engine behind Node and Deno), Bun runs on JavaScriptCore, the engine used in Safari. This choice helps it stay fast and efficient, both in terms of memory and startup time.