zig-clap VS zls

Zig and Rust both promote explicit error handling, however their mechanisms are different. Rust uses Result enums, while Zig uses a (global) error set type (though similar to an enum) and error propagation. Similarly, Rust uses the Option enum for optional types, while Zig uses a type modifier (?T). Both offer modern, syntactic sugar to handle those (call()? and if let Some(value) = optional {} in Rust, try call() and if (optional) |value| {} in Zig). Since Rust uses the standard library to implement error handling and options, users have the possibility to extend those systems which is quite powerful. However, I like the approach Zig takes in providing those things as language features. While their approach fits well into the C universe, I dislike that there is no pragmatic way to add more context to an error (but well, no allocations). Libraries like [clap](https://github.com/Hejsil/zig-clap) solve this by implementing a diagnostics mechanism.

It's somewhat early, but there are libraries like https://github.com/Hejsil/zig-clap that can make writing CLIs a bit easier.

Command line args: std.process or the zig-clap library

There is no official documentation but the standard library provides definitions for the exchange format and an incomplete set of function for exchanging messages in Client.zig and Server.zig. You can find examples of the zig compile server in action in my PR for ZLS and a showcase of hot-code-swapping by kubkon. The code that implements the ZCS in the zig codebase can be found here.

Same experience here, I did file a bug about it too: https://github.com/zigtools/zls/issues/1139

Welcome to the word of new languages, I think rust just got an intellij plugin late last year and its been in 1.0 since 2015 (not to mention the years of hype around it). When it comes to "non standard" languages (meaning not the industries current go to for a given niche), it helps to assume there's no "It's just works" type editor support. Luckily most languages, even new ones have LSP servers including zig, and editors like VSCode make it pretty simple to use them.

For the people who come in the future and want to know how to do it, here is the code as of today (at some point it will be in ZLS repository - github.com/zigtools/zls - and you should take a look there too to see more up-to-date code).

Commands: git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/zigtools/zls cd zls zig build -Drelease-safe

> Building is slow. It takes about ~3 seconds minimum which is frustratingly slow when I'm fighting basic syntax errors. I wish there was a fast zig check.

> Lack of zig-analyzer makes learning hard.

> zig fmt src/main.zig is nice. Wish it automatically ran on all files.

I also did (well, "am doing", can only work a bit each day and am plugging through day 7 right now) AdventOfCode in Zig this year.

These points here didn't resonate with me at all. I wonder if the author knew about or tried ZLS[0]. I had it on and integrated with my VSCode and it would check a lot of things as I went and format on save. I think I followed something like this[1] to set it up.

[0] https://github.com/zigtools/zls

cd $HOME/.local/zls && curl -L https://github.com/zigtools/zls/releases/download/0.9.0/x86_64-macos.tar.xz | tar -xJ --strip-components=1 -C .