This is so cool! I'm really impressed with what I've seen out of Zig so far. I need to come up with a project to try it out with. It seems like a great successor to C
Yep. Zig is shaping up to be the low-level programming language I've been waiting for to replace C++ for me. It just needs to mature and stabilize a bit before it's production-quality.
It's all a matter of personal preference, and Rust is just not what I'm looking for in a C++ replacement, I guess. My biggest issue with C++ is the complexity of the language. C++ is a language that fetishizes accidental complexity, making it the center of things, and now it seems that Rust is saying, "hold my beer." Zig, on the other hand, fits my aesthetics pretty much perfectly, although I'm sure that, as with all programming languages, some people would have the opposite preference. As for correctness, one thing I've learned in the years I've been using formal methods is that there are many paths to correctness, and I'm starting to think that even on that front Zig's approach (of dynamic verification) might ultimately prove a better one.
Rust is great for when you're writing a serious, security-critical program that can't have any memory-corruption bugs or data races. It makes writing programs a little more challenging, and sometimes you sacrifice a bit of runtime performance compared to C, but it's often worth it.
But Game Boy Advance games don't really fit that description. GBA games don't accept untrusted input, and nothing bad happens if they're "compromised". (Like, when people discovered arbitrary code execution in Super Mario World, no one was worried about the security implications.) So languages like C or Zig that let you cowboy values directly into specific memory locations can be a better choice.
I'm excited about Zig in particular because the mission statement seems to be "C but nicer" -- you get the same basic programming model, but with things like instance methods, generic types, better macros, arbitrary-bit-integer types and a "crash when hitting undefined behavior" compile mode.
Idk, I use Rust wherever I would use any other programming language, but I'm also a huge fan of the language in general. There's no need to limit it to "serious" applications
Arbitrary code execution isn’t that big a deal when one of the features of the device is that it accepts a ram image over its synchronous serial port which is jumped into after being received.
Not the OP, for me what I am looking forward is a systems language with automatic memory management, in the same vein as Modula-3, Active Oberon, D or System C#.
Swift fills that slot, but only on Apple platforms. Linux hardly has portable support even for file access and Windows will get supported some day, and most 3rd party libraries assume Apple anyway.
D has a great community, but still found lacking in some areas.
.NET AOT compiled with the learnings taken from System C# (7.x - 9) is the closest for my daily coding activities.
Ideally Delphi like with automatic memory management.
Or maybe having a Rust IDE with visual representation of lifetimes would already be productive enough.
Maybe a stupid question: if I want to write cross-platform desktop GUI apps and be able to take full advantage of the desktop GUI (menus, status icons in the system tray, etc.), and I'm mostly developing on Windows, what should I learn? That's what I'm looking for, and I'm sure it already exists; I just don't know how to find it other than asking around.
(I tried to install some Haskell GUI libraries, but that's very difficult on Windows. I eventually got haskell-gi to install, but as far as I could tell, it had no support for status icons.)
If you are doing Windows stuff and want native UI, then there is no way around Delphi, .NET or C++ (or C if you are masochist enough to use bare bones Win32).
Qt does a pretty good job for C++ and Python, but it is not native if that is what you're looking for.
JavaFX would be a good approach if you are into JVM languages, but you might need to do some JNI wrappers to call stuff like system tray, as just like Qt it does its own rendering.
Some corporations, go the route of having common code for the business logic, and then create an abstraction layer for stuff like system tray, UI widgets and stuff. Although is does require additional development cost.
So you call something like show_tray_message "New Email" and have an implementation for each OS that you care about.
If you are using Haskell, have you tried Haskell Platform?
Thanks for the information! Qt is fine. I might switch back to Linux in the future, and want to be able to carry over anything I write if I do. I have a working prototype in Python using PySide already (which handles the system tray well), but I figure I ought to know a compiled language with static typing. (I know interpreted vs. compiled is a questionable distinction to make these days; what I want is a language that comes with something to produce independent executable files as part of its basic tooling.
I've tried Haskell Platform. I had a lot of path problems in trying to install gtk2hs - it wasn't always obvious where things were (nor that Stack came with its own mingw, so I got my own, and that caused more problems... eventually I wiped everything Haskell-related and started from scratch with Platform), and there's also a known problem with gtk2hs where you have to edit some cabal files to make installation work on Windows, so I would've had to do local installs. I think I got gtk2hs to install at one point, and even to compile their sample hello-world program, but trying to actually run it gave a litany of obscure errors. WxHaskell has an installer batch file, but it just spewed errors at me. I spent about a week trying to install various GUI libraries, and the only one I tried that I managed to get working was gi-gtk... which doesn't have system tray support.
I'm hoping to avoid C++ and Java, but if I have to bite that bullet, I will.
Indeed, however it seems having a community even smaller than D, and it is still on the phase of depending on C or C++ as compiler backends, just like C++ and Objective-C on their early days.
They are different languages and you can be exited for both and want to use both. I think it is unnecessary to have this kind of comment after every statement on other languages as if ones excitement for one would completely take the other one out of the picture.
I would say why I really like Zig is because the minimalism of C is still there in the syntax and it makes a whole lot of very smart choices to keep this simplicity while being so much more expressive than C.
If you really need some Rust pro's I would say it is great as the language that finally brings more of ML and functional ideas into high performance programming. Most languages nowadays have fp things but Rust has it very deep into its core. Other than that it is great to see proof systems reaching the mainstream and the security guarantees its ownership system gives is great.
They did when Rust was as mature as Zig is now. Language popularity is a reasonable deciding factor when one is starting a project that has a hiring component; personal projects not so much.
Do you have a public repo of your Advent code? I started out trying to use Zig but couldn’t find documentation on how to complete even basic tasks (like passing a filename as a command line arg, then opening and reading a file line by line), so I gave up. Maybe seeing a repo of good Zig code accomplishing these tasks would get me going.
Check out the Zig standard library and the tests for examples on doing some basic stuff with the language. Tests are generally at the end of files, you can search for "test".
I had looked at his 2018 Advent repo and was disappointed to find that he simply pasted his input directly into the code, whereas I like to compile generic binaries that can read inputs from the command line. However, it looks like his 2019 solutions for days 1 and 2 at least do read input from a file, so this year looks like it'll be a better starting point.