Comment by jamiejquinn

3 months ago

Has it changed how you program in other languages? Because that to me is the true mark of a thought-shifting language.

3 comments

jamiejquinn

The big thing I would say I actually learned and would intentionally apply to other languages is SIMD programming. Otherwise, I'd say it gave me a much clearer mental model of memory management that helps me understand other languages much more fundamentally. Along with getting my hands directly on custom allocators for the first time, a question that took me time to figure out but gave me a lot of clarity in answering was "why can't you do closures in Zig?" Programming in Zig feels very Go-like, and not having closures was actually one of the biggest hiccups for me. I don't think this really changed how I write in other languages, but definitely how I think about other languages.

jamiejquinn 3 months ago
Snap! I also played around with closures a tonne in Zig. Definitely possible but not... ergonomic. Haven't ended up using them much.
And agree with allocators; in C I always considered using custom allocators but never really needed to. Having them just available in the zig std means I actually use them. The testing allocator is particularly useful IMO.
Never used Go but if it's Zig-like I might give it a shot! Thanks!
- Zambyte 3 months ago
  
  I'll make a list of the things that both languages have in common that make them feel similar to me:
  - structs and functions are the main means of composition - the pattern of: allocate resource, immediately defer deallocating the resource - errors are values, handled very similarly (multiple return values vs error unions) - built in json <-> struct support - especially with the 0.16.0 Io changes in Zig, the concurrency story (std.Io.async[0] is equivalent to the go keyword[1], std.Io.Queue[2] is equivalent to channels[3], std.Io.select[4] is equivalent to the select keyword[5]) - batteries included but not sprawling stdlib - git based dependencies - built in testing
  [0] https://ziglang.org/documentation/master/std/#std.Io.async
  [1] https://go.dev/tour/concurrency/1
  [2] https://ziglang.org/documentation/master/std/#std.Io.Queue
  [3] https://go.dev/tour/concurrency/2
  [4] https://ziglang.org/documentation/master/std/#std.Io.select
  [5] https://go.dev/tour/concurrency/5