Comment by lioeters
6 hours ago
Instead of waiting for faster compiler in Rust, how about from the other direction, adding some kind of borrow checker to Zig? That sounds more within reach and practically achievable, possibly even in userland.
6 hours ago
Instead of waiting for faster compiler in Rust, how about from the other direction, adding some kind of borrow checker to Zig? That sounds more within reach and practically achievable, possibly even in userland.
That's sort of what I'm doing...
I'm writing a language with Affine Ownership that transpiles to Zig and has a built-in FSM-based Green Fiber runtime.
Affine Ownership gives you memory safety + fearless concurrency + eliminates the need for Go's GC.
It's obviously going to slow down compilation - since you need to do Rust's borrow checking, etc. But I can do this incrementally as well...
It's impossible to add a borrow checker to any existing language.
The reason Rust has a working borrow checker is because every part of the language from structs, enum, traits, generics and all the way to the syntax itself has been designed to support lifetimes and borrow checking.
It's is not something you can just tack on to an existing language without fundamentally changing it.
I wouldn't say it's impossible, rather un-ergonomic. TypeScript can add type information to ordinary JavaScript code via JSDoc comments; the result can both be executed as ordinary JavaScript as-is and type-checked with TypeScript. But it's a huge pain to try to write (and maintain) everything that way, it was supported as a hack to help migrate legacy codebases. You could probably take a similar "the lifetimes are embedded in comments" approach with other languages, and the result would be similarly un-ergonomic.
That is possible (clang has experimental lifetime annotations support), but that is not enough to guarantee memory safety.
As a simple example, Zig has no private fields. That makes encapsulating any unsafety impossible.
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C# was already a very mature language when it had referenes and later "ref safety" added to it.
Swift, Linear Haskell, Chapel, Ada/SPARK are all counter examples from such claim.
Also OxCaml, from what I hear.
> It's impossible to add a borrow checker to any existing language.
Why do you say that. Have you tried and failed? It seems to be possible to add a borrow checker to zig, just as you can add MIRI to rust to get extra safety in unsafe blocks.
> how about from the other direction, adding some kind of borrow checker to Zig? That sounds more within reach and practically achievable, possibly even in userland.
It's doable, and as static analysis. see sibling comment.
No, it would fundamentally change how Zig works.
no, it would not. If you do not believe me, you should try out the repo.
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