zig-okredis VS zig

> 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

There is an issue proposing this approach: https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/4284

https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/224

e.g.:

> > When debugging/prototyping, it's useful to comment out a line without having to refactor, e.g.

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