Comment by the_duke
5 years ago
As mentioned in my other (wall of text) comment, that's not strictly beneficial.
It forces you to implement a lot of logic in "userspace" that other languages do for you automatically.
Complexity for certain abstractions moves from the language to user code, at the expense of consistency, cohesion, totality and (auto-generated) documentation.
It will be interesting to see how things play out for Zig once the ecosystem grows a little and libraries appear, but there are very significant downsides to this approach.
Which of those is more beneficial indeed remains to be seen and might end up being purely a matter of personal taste; the very thing you call a downside I see as an upside. I think that talking about the positives "consistency and cohesion" where composing primitives works as a positive is merely a matter of habit. Zig treats some aspects that other languages sees as primitives as if they were any other part of the language, where code and libraries rule rather than a growing collection of primitives. I do agree that in principle a language could be too unstructured for some domains (Lisp?) but interestingly, Zig didn't go as far as syntax macros, whereas Rust did. Anyway, Zig finds a surprising middle-ground that is, as yet, hard to definitively judge, whereas Rust, for better or worse, is more of the same.
I was thinking of The Lisp Curse[1] while reading your comment and then you mentioned the language! I’m quite excited by Zig (even if safety is lower priority for it than for Rust, it is really pushing the tooling envelope) but I do wonder whether the “anti-composition hypothesis” here holds up for relevant projects today. Many C programs include shims for compatibility between multiple different “library object models” (hell even strings count here) and they seem to be a common source of security and performance issues. Maybe in the domains where Zig is most competitive that dynamic won’t play out? Or maybe comptime provides tools that will still enable composition or at least allow for lower overhead “object model shims”? I suspect that it will be hard to know more about how it plays out until there is more language stability and code sharing, maybe even a repository like npm or crates.io.
[1] http://www.winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Lisp_Curse.html
Can the "safety is lower priority than rust" trend stop? Zig is not less concerned with safety and will catch illegal behaviour at runtime for that which isn't caught at compile-time. It's only ReleaseSmall and ReleaseFast that elide this where you're able to toggle safety checks via a builtin if you wish. There's ongoing work to provide more of it within the standard library with the GeneralPurposeAllocator being an example of it.
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