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by Vendan 1643 days ago
Zig is such a cool looking language, really just love the idea of comptime, but every time it comes up, all I can think about is how it's mandating spaces for indentations. I know it seems pedantic, but a programming language just saying "I don't care about accessibility by the visually impaired" when it is just text comes across as overbearing and insensitive.

https://www.reddit.com/r/javascript/comments/c8drjo/nobody_t...
1 comments
lhorie 1643 days ago
IIRC the self hosting compiler will allow both spaces and tabs, but they didn't feel it was worthwhile to backport this to the bootstrap compiler.
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Vendan 1643 days ago
That's... slightly better, but afaict, "allows both spaces and tabs" seems to be "convert tabs to spaces"

    zig fmt accepts and converts tabs to spaces, \r\n to \n, as well as many other transformations of non-canonical to canonical style.
Which is... still saying "spaces instead of tabs"
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zamadatix 1643 days ago
"zig fmt" is the formatter not the aforementioned self hosted compiler.
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Vendan 1643 days ago
It's a part of the ecosystem, and is, AFAICT, saying "tabs are not welcome here". Happy to be proven wrong.
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lhorie 1643 days ago
See https://github.com/ziglang/zig/wiki/FAQ#why-does-zig-force-m...

In a nutshell, what you're currently using is the stage 1 compiler, aka the bootstrapping compiler to compile the official zig compiler going forward. zig fmt is opinionated because it was only meant to enforce formatting for the zig project. At that stage of the project's life, they felt it was more important to get shit done in a consistent manner w/ the people that are actually contributing than to cater to a hypothetical accessibility-impaired developer that isn't.

Zig is a very ambitious project. Prioritizing pragmatism over ideology is a fairly common theme with it currently. Another example: they repeatedly break stdlib APIs because catering to a larger audience is currently less important than getting other things nailed down first.

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Vendan 1643 days ago
I stand (partially) corrected, though everything there does still seem to point towards "tabs tolerated, but the formatter will convert to spaces". I also find it highly amusing that `zig fmt` converts tabs to spaces, and yet they point at gofmt, which, as far as I'm concerned, is the gold standard of "tabs for indentation, spaces for alignment." It could be that that is where zig wants to land eventually, and if so, I'm going to be quite happy and excited.
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