ziglyph VS nomicon

> My big problem with Zig is that Andrew Kelley is promising a lot of features, but doesn't really deliver much.

Have you, like, seen the release notes for 0.9.0?

https://ziglang.org/download/0.9.0/release-notes.html

> Zig still can't proper handle UTF-8 strings [1] in 2022

There's plenty of discussion on the subject in basically every HN thread about Zig: the stdlib has some utf8 and wtf validation code, ziglyph implements the full unicode spec.

https://github.com/jecolon/ziglyph

You might not like how it's done, but its factually incorrect to state that Zig can't handle unicode.

> In a `recent` interview[2], he claims that Zig is faster than C and Rust, but he refers to extremely short benchmarking that has almost no value in the real world.

From my reddit reply to this same topic:

This podcast interview might not be the best showcase of the practical implications of Zig's take on safety and performance. If you want something with more meat, I highly recommend Andrew's recent talk from Handmade Seattle, where he shows the work being done on the Zig self-hosted compiler.

https://media.handmade-seattle.com/practical-data-oriented-d...

Lots of bit fiddling that can't be fully proven safe statically, but then you get a compiler capable of compiling Zig code stupidly fast, and that's even without factoring in incremental compilation with in-place binary patching, with which we're aiming for sub-millisecond rebuilds of arbitrarily large projects.

> The ecosystem for zig is insignificant now and a stable release would help the language.

I hope you don't mind if we don't take this advice, given the overall tone of your post.

For Unicode text processing you can take a look at Ziglyph https://github.com/jecolon/ziglyph and for a sample UTF-8 string structure, Zigstr https://github.com/jecolon/zigstr . (bias alert: I'm the author of both. :^D )

Agreed, and Zig also has a lib for that as well:

https://github.com/jecolon/ziglyph/

Yes, sorry about that - I omitted a bit of that information for brevity.

If you want to play with allkeys.txt (which is by far much more sequential, simpler data than UnicodeData.txt) then you only need to remove the non-NFD strings (since the Unicode Collation Algorithm's first step requires you to decompose the string's code points to canonical NFD form), that removes ~2,000 entries.

The full file parser code, which strips those out and other useless information like comments and version information can be found here: https://github.com/jecolon/ziglyph/blob/main/src/collator/Al...

If you want to play around with UnicodeData.txt (which is less sequential, more complex data) then only two fields are used (the code point and decomposition field), and only records where the second field is not empty (the full decomposition type name in angle brackets is not needed, only whether it is or is not there is important.)

The full parser code for that file can be found here: https://github.com/jecolon/ziglyph/blob/main/src/normalizer/...

Hope that helps!

it’s even written by the same person that wrote the Nomicon (the guide to the dark arts of unsafe)

If you want to dive deeper you can always have other options but now there are concrete cases, if you want to do low level thing https://doc.rust-lang.org/nomicon/ while if you want multi thread/concurrency stuff https://marabos.nl/atomics/ . There are many many books so you will have to point yourself to what you want

Nonononono. SeqCst is the most error prone memory order: https://github.com/rust-lang/nomicon/issues/166

Hope this helps. For more details, see the Rustonomicon. I referenced the subtyping chapter here extensively.

Nice video! Glad I could help out. This stuff is hard, and I'm still learning a lot about it myself even years later. The Rustonomicon is a great read if you haven't already.

Have you got a moment to read through the good book , after reading through this perhaps try the Rustonomicon.

That is not what UB means. Undefined Behaviour is behaviour that the compiler is allowed to assume will never happen, and which can consequently cause miscompilations due to optimisation passes gone wrong if it does in fact occur in the source code.

It's true that Rust does not have a written specification that clearly delineates what is and isn't UB in a single place. But:

1. UB is impossible in safe code (modulo bugs in unsafe code)

2. There are resources such as the Rustinomicon (https://doc.rust-lang.org/nomicon/) that provide a detailed guide on what is and isn't allowed in unsafe code.

In practice, it's much easier to avoid UB in Rust than it is in C++.

However, this is a wide topic out of scope for a Reddit comment, so maybe just read the Rustonomicon. It explains everything about data handling in Rust.

The ownership model & borrow checker makes rust a bit of an awkward language in which to write complex data structures like trees and graphs. It can be done - since you can always use raw pointers & unsafe code when you absolutely need to to treat rust like C. But the language fights you, and the community can get a bit moralistic about this sort of thing. The rust nomicon is a fantastic resource for learning the limits of the borrow checker, and where and how to use unsafe code correctly. You will need unsafe less than you think you will, but sometimes you will have no choice.