[COFF] Zig (was Re: more about Brian... [really Rust])

[Dan Cross]

On Sat, Feb 5, 2022 at 6:18 PM Derek Fawcus <
dfawcus+lists-coff at employees.org> wrote:

> On Fri, Feb 04, 2022 at 06:18:09PM -0500, Dan Cross wrote:
> > [TUHS to Bcc, +COFF <coff at minnie.tuhs.org> ]
> >
> > This isn't exactly COFF material, but I don't know what list is more
> > appropriate.
> >
>
> [snip]
>
> > However, right now? I think it
> > sits at a local maxima for systems languages targeting bare-metal.
>
> Have you played with Zig?  I've only just started, but it does seem to
> be trying to address a number of the issues with C ub, and safety,
> while sticking closer to the 'C' space vs where I see Rust targetting
> the 'C++' space.
>
> It doesn't have Rust's ownership / borrow checker stuff, it does seem
> to have bounds checking on arrays.
>

To be fair, I haven't given zig an honest shake yet. That said, the borrow
checker and ownership are a major part of what makes Rust really useful: it
dramatically reduces the burden of manual memory management. True, it also
means that some of the things one would like to do are annoying (mutually
self-referential data structures can be rough; self-referential structures
similarly since a move is conceptually equivalent to memcpy).

My cursory scan says that Zig already has a lot over C for this space,
though.

e.g. the UB for multiply example you give ends up as a run time panic
> (which I suspect can be caught), or one can use a different (wrapping)
> multiply operator similar to in Rust.


> i.e. see the below test program and its output.
>

Nice.

        - Dan C.
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