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

[Adam Thornton]

Something Larry said right before the discussion moved over here, and a
conversation I was having some in a different place last week:

"languages with guard rails"

I'm not gonna complain about them.  Don't get me wrong: I love v6 and v7
Unix, and the Lions book is great, and I have enjoyed "int?  Pointer?  Why
should I care?" plenty of times.  I've done my share of Perl golfing.

But on the other hand: languages with strong typing and happening-for-me
memory management, while they may be more constraining if I'm going to be
writing something new, of my own design, from a blank slate...

Most of my career has been spent not doing that.  A lot more of it has been
being handed a pile of code that was written by someone who left the
company a couple years before I got there, and being told to find out why
it began breaking last week, and that the company is leaking money every
time it breaks.  And in that circumstance, I really don't want clever in
the code I'm looking at.  I don't want to have to figure out that some
chunk of memory is a stealthily-declared union that usually holds a pointer
to a character string except sometimes it holds an int whose value is
meaningful.  I want to be able to look at it and see, from the structure
and the type annotations, what the intent of the code was, because when
that's clear, it's usually a lot easier to figure out what's subtly wrong
with the implementation.
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