zig-okredis VS tigerbeetle

> I don't really understand your crusade.

Accuracy is important in the marketplace of ideas, and especially in programming. Software is too buggy already, and it would only add more bugs to have programmers not understand the languages they use.

> I made this same observation in the past, it never satisfied you.

Yes, you made that same observation, and I appreciate that. But as @kbd so unintentionally demonstrated, people still believe that Zig is colorless. I want to dispel that notion completely.

I think you are not adding to the problem, and that is great. But the notion is still there.

> Your blog post is full of wrong information. I tried to explain to you what was wrong when you first posted it (so you can refer to those comments, if you want), but you keep seeing this as some kind of philosophical debate, and I have no interest in having this debate.

Here is all of the comments you made on Hacker News on the comments [1] about my blog post.

> That's exactly it. It just enables code reuse. You still have to think about how your application will behave, but you won't have to use an async-flavored reimplementaion of another library. Case in point: zig-okredis works in both sync and async applicatons, and I don't have to maintain two codebases.

> https://github.com/kristoff-it/zig-okredis

> I thought using "colorblind" in the title of my original blogpost would be a clear enough hint to the reader that the colors still exist, but I guess you can never be too explicit.

and

> That's how it works in Zig. Calling an async function like this will also await it.

The closest thing to "explain[ing] to [me] what was wrong when [I] first posted it" is probably that first comment, which was in reply to

> I may be totally wrong with this assumption, but the way I understoo[d] Zig's color-less async support is that the compiler either creates a "red" or "blue" function body from the same source code based on how the function is called (so on the language level, function coloring doesn't matter, but it does in compiler output).

> The compiler still needs to stamp out colored function bodies because the generated code for a function with async support needs to look different - the compiler needs to turn the code into a state machine instead of a simple sequence).

> It's a bit unfortunate that red and blue functions appear to have a different "ABI signature", but I guess that's needed to pass an additional context pointer into a function with async support (which would otherwise be the implicit stack pointer).

(Original comment at [2] by flohofwoe.)

So if anybody explained anything, it's flohofwoe.

But flohofwoe's comment goes directly against the the language reference, so it's hard for me to believe.

The language reference says that sync functions are turned async if they call async functions. This implies virality of async on functions, which implies that many functions are definitely async-only.

If the compiler does something different, which it would have to if it actually makes two different versions of each function, then the language reference is wrong. Like I said, accuracy matters, so I would also like to see changes in the Zig language reference about this if that's the case.

> As I said to you already in the past, I just write software with Zig async and it works.

Yes, you write working software in Zig async, but you understand it better than most. People who go to the language reference and write based on that may not be able to write working software with Zig async as easily as you.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30965805

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30967070

I'm waiting for someone to implement the Redis API by swapping out the state machine in TigerBeetle (which was built modularly such that the state machine can be swapped out).

https://tigerbeetle.com/

I fully agree with what Prime says at the end - Joran has really set a new bar here for all future database presentations.

Hearing that the entire TigerBeetle domain logic lives in a single file [0] (and is intended to be pluggable for other OLTP use cases!) makes it 1000% more tempting to spend the weekend getting up to speed with Zig.

[0] https://github.com/tigerbeetle/tigerbeetle/blob/main/src/sta...

Why would you want to build your own accounting ledger from scratch? Accounting is a completely new domain for most engineers, and TigerBeetle (https://tigerbeetle.com/) already solves this problem.

Maelstrom [1], a workbench for learning distributed systems from the creator of Jepsen, includes a simple (model-checked) implementation of Raft and an excellent tutorial on implementing it.

Raft is a simple algorithm, but as others have noted, the original paper includes many correctness details often brushed over in toy implementations. Furthermore, the fallibility of real-world hardware (handling memory/disk corruption and grey failures), the requirements of real-world systems with tight latency SLAs, and a need for things like flexible quorum/dynamic cluster membership make implementing it for production a long and daunting task. The commit history of etcd and hashicorp/raft, likely the two most battle-tested open source implementations of raft that still surface correctness bugs on the regular tell you all you need to know.

The tigerbeetle team talks in detail about the real-world aspects of distributed systems on imperfect hardware/non-abstracted system models, and why they chose viewstamp replication, which predates Paxos but looks more like Raft.

[1]: https://github.com/jepsen-io/maelstrom/

[2]: https://github.com/tigerbeetle/tigerbeetle/blob/main/docs/DE...

> There is no reason to use a memory unsafe language anymore, except legacy codebases, and that is also slowly but surely diminishing. I'm still yet to hear this amazingly compelling reason that you just need memory unsafe languages. In terms of cost/benefits analysis, memory unsafety is literally all costs.

Tell that to the authors of new memory unsafe languages (like Zig) and creators of new project in those languages (like https://tigerbeetle.com) :(