zigself VS zig

I don't know about "daily" right now (I've had to take a break due to obligations), but I'm working on a modern implementation of the Self programming language with actor capabilities: https://github.com/sin-ack/zigself

It's nowhere near usable yet, but Zig has been a joy to work with for over a year, and I can definitely see myself using it for a big piece of software.

> Creating a language with the feel of a lisp, the environment of Smalltalk, and the concurrency of Erlang has been my dream for a long time.

I'm trying to eventually accomplish something like this: https://github.com/sin-ack/zigself

It's an implementation of the Self programming language in Zig, with an actor model inspired by Erlang.

The main thing to realize is that Lisp and Smalltalk are very much symmetrical in terms of structure. There is no real distinction between the two other than syntax and basic computation unit (closures vs. objects). And even closures can be used as objects and vice versa.

That only leaves the concurrency model. I have a basic implementation of actors using objects as the "context". It still has a long way to go to reach the supervisor tree model of Erlang, but interestingly enough, the ideas in the article are reflected here heavily; behaviorism is at the core of Self.

It's "Zig" not "Zag". https://ziglang.org/ Zig is under heavy development, but there's a single page https://ziglang.org/documentation/0.12.0/ that is a reasonably comprehensive source of truth about the current state of the language.

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