6 HN users recommended this talk7 months2018–2024score 8.5
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026
HN repeatedly recommends it as the definitive introduction to Zig straight from its author, and links to it whenever Zig's design choices come up.
Andrew Kelley, creator of Zig, introduces the language at the Recurse Center's Localhost series in 2018. He covers its goals of robustness, optimality and clarity, C interop, cross-compilation and explicit allocators.
“here's a great talk on zig from the recurse center” (HN, 2019)
1. Why Do Keynote Speakers Keep Suggesting That Improving Security Is Possible? - James Mickens [link] 2. James Mickens on JavaScript - James Mickens [link] 3. Creating containers From Scratch - Liz Rice [link] 4. 2013 Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate: The Existence of Nothing - Panelists: J. Richard Gott, Jim Holt, Lawrence Krauss, Charles Seife, Eve Silverstein. Moderator: Neil deGrasse Tyson [link] 5. 2016 Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate: Is the Universe a Simulation? - Panelists: David Chalmers, Zohreh Davoudi, James Gates, Lisa Randall, Max Tegmark Moderator: Neil deGrasse Tyson [link] 6. Zig: A programming language designed for robustness, optimality, and clarity – Andrew Kelley [this video] 7. Concurrency Is Not Parallelism - Rob Pike [link]
Zig is really interesting, and the explicit allocators is a feature I miss in many other system languages (like Rust). Presentation by the Zig author is a good introduction to the concept [this video]
Looking for more on Zig I found a talk [0] (~1 hour) on the language by Andrew Kelley from just a few months ago. Edit: I see there already questions about Rust in this thread. There's an audience question on Rust in the talk [1] and the creator states that Rust is Zig's biggest competitor. [0] [this video] [1] [this video]
I don't know of an 'objective' thorough evaluation of Zig as it stands, but I hope these are of interest: Previous HackerNews discussion on Zig: [link] Also, perhaps not as objective as you'd like but still good resources: Whirlwind tour of the basic thinking behind Zig: [link] A ~50 minute talk on Zig, by its creator: [this video]
The Zig language has a great premise, it's worth reading the above link or watching a bit of this video [this video] just to question our assumptions that certain language features need exist at all.
Questions whether certain language features need to exist
> I think there's room for other languages to occupy a similar space but they're need to focus on no-std-lib no-runtime operation (not always the sexiest target). You're describing the Zig language! It aims to be as fast as C, and unlike most languages that say this is a goal, it means it. There's no "almost as fast as C if you ignore the garbage-collector and the array-bounds-checking", it's actually as fast as C. Its author values the minimalism of C, but wants to create a far better language for doing that sort of work. [0] They're doing surprisingly well. They even managed to make a faster-than-C (faster even than hand-tuned assembly) SHA-2 [1] [0] [link] , [link] [1] [link] , it's also mentioned somewhere in this talk [this video]
Obviously Zig's output (courtesy of its LLVM backend) can be expressed and distributed as assembly code, but it's not hand-tuned, it's compiler-generated. Whether the hand-tuned assembly code they used was the fastest out there, I'm not sure. I'd hope so, or they're being misleading. I might get time to re-watch the relevant part of the video - it's around the 21 minutes mark - [this video]
> So I assume you could make a standard compliant compiler that doesn't nothing but immediately overflows the stack. Interesting thought. I imagine just about every language spec (with the possible exception of assembly languages) states something like If memory is exhausted, a handler is executed or If memory is exhausted, the behaviour is undefined , and it's always going to be up to the compiler/interpreter to make reasonable use of the available memory on the specific target platform. Would a C compiler be non-compliant if it generated code that used 100x the memory that would be used by code generated by typical C compiler? How about 1,000,000,000x so that its generated programs always failed immediately? Java is an interesting case for this, as it famously doesn't require that a garbage collector needs to be included at all (unlike .Net which does). In Java, not only are you permitted to have a conservative GC, you're permitted to have no GC whatsoever (something OpenJDK now offers [0]). Apparently [1] Java requires that the collector (if it exists) will run before the JVM throws OutOfMemoryError . I imagine the formal methods folks must have done some thinking on this topic, as their whole field is about doing better than just go ahead and test it out . Could a standards-compliant C compiler used in a safety-critical domain generate code that, only very occasionally, uses a billion times the memory it typically uses? Somewhat related: one of the motivations behind the
Zig does however go a long way towards memory safety, to be fair, and if you wanted to, you could also argue similarly that Rust does not guarantee 100% OOM safety whereas Zig does: [this video] I would also say that for "very large long lived projects", memory safety is not actually the most important issue, but rather correctness, followed by (in no particular order) safety, performance, explicitness, readability and exhaustive fine-grained error handling, the latter also not found in too many languages besides Zig.
[this video] Software Should Be Perfect - A journey of questioning assumptions and building a new programming language This has been my goal since the beginning. I wasn't kidding
Zig's creator recalls the talk's goal of perfect software
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