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zig
General-purpose programming language and toolchain for maintaining robust, optimal, and reusable software.
If bugs are your concern, then this upcoming release is good news for you. Total number of open bug reports is 1,124. However if we remove bugs labeled "stage1" - that is - bugs that are no longer applicable because this release changes the default compiler to the self-hosted one - then the number drops to 514. It would be a fair characterization to say that this release cuts the number of known bugs in half. We have those stage1 bug reports still open because I mandated that every one must have test coverage before being closed, even though they are already fixed in master branch.
That said, I would humbly ask for you to trust my leadership on finding the balance on how much effort to spend on bug fixing versus how much to spend on progress. I think you underestimate how much is going to change before Zig tags 1.0. There are still a few experimental and exploratory changes planned, and when software specifications change, bugs are inevitably introduced. Spending the time to iron out 100% of the bugs found from fuzz testing, on a feature that ends up replaced with a different one that also needs to get debugged, is a waste of time, and a disservice to the wider user base of the project. We're better off finding the "sweet spot" for a swift journey, arriving at our destination early, and then busting out the hardcore QA.
I see https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/13211 mentioned elsewhere in this thread. I want to point out that getting the C ABI correct when using LLVM is a notoriously perilous process, as any other compiler dev reading HN today can attest, and this regression which lasted for a total of 6 days in master branch without ever gracing a tagged release, is a symptom of the fact that we actually addressed this C ABI problem at its core, added more test coverage, added an abstraction in the LLVM code generation, and fixed the C ABI for several targets.
And finally, I agree that fuzz testing should be integrated into Zig's unit testing system. That would be a nice enhancement.
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> 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.
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InfluxDB
Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.
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I always enjoy reading about Zig advancements. I haven't developed anything substantial in Zig yet, but I'm very optimistic about the future of the language.
If you're curious to see a large Zig codebase, two significant projects are Bun [1] and TigerBeetle [2].
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tigerbeetle
The distributed financial transactions database designed for mission critical safety and performance.
I always enjoy reading about Zig advancements. I haven't developed anything substantial in Zig yet, but I'm very optimistic about the future of the language.
If you're curious to see a large Zig codebase, two significant projects are Bun [1] and TigerBeetle [2].
