Comment by Zambyte

3 months ago

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.

2 comments

Zambyte

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