ziglyph VS reason

> 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!

Hey HN, at Ahrefs we have been working on an online book that hopefully helps React developers get up and running with Melange, an OCaml to JavaScript compiler. You can read more about Melange here: https://melange.re/.

There are still a few chapters that we'd like to add before considering it "complete", but it might be already helpful for some folks out there, that's why we decided to publish it early.

The book uses Reason syntax to implement React components using ReasonReact components. You can read more about both in:

https://reasonml.github.io/

ReScript is "Fast, Simple, Fully Typed JavaScript from the Future". What that means is that ReScript has a lightning fast compiler, an easy to learn JS like syntax, strong static types, with amazing features like pattern matching and variant types. Until 2020 it was called "BuckleScript" and is closely related to ReasonML.

This tracks with how I've seen "normal" languages converge on similar, flawed imitations of better type systems through tools and repurposed syntax. Thank you for confirming.

Do you have any recommendations or warnings regarding general languages which reach in the opposite direction? Reason[1] and F#[2] are both examples: they attach pre-existing ecosystems and compile-for-$PLATFORM tools to OCaml-like typing.

OCaml itself is also intriguing for personal projects. However, I'm worried the "GPL" in its standard library's LGPL license might scare people despite both the linking exception and Jane Street's MIT alternative.

1. https://reasonml.github.io/

ReasonML purely as a syntax layer on top of OCaml is still being updated and released[1]. Incidentally, I'm one of the maintainers of that project too :-)

With this Melange release, we're hoping to somewhat revive ReasonML and channel some folks back to the community from the perspective of a vertically integrated platform that has seen major investment in the past few years.

[1]: https://github.com/reasonml/reason

Why not use https://reasonml.github.io/ instead? Or just use Typescript?

Quieted down, but I depend on projects with worst graphs:

https://github.com/reasonml/reason/graphs/contributors

There is also reasonml for Web development.