[spiffyk]

> how do you write a map function? Or filter, find, etc.

You just don't. Zig does not have lambdas anyway, there's no readability incentive to having such functions there. You do these things with plain old loops built into the language.

[reissbaker]

Zig has first-class functions (you can pass functions as parameters); it just doesn't have closures. Map pretty rarely uses closures anyway IME; e.g. converting a list to JSON doesn't need to close over outside variables. And anyway, anything that's:

1. Generic over lists, and

2. Takes a function as a parameter

Will want to know what the node field name is. Luckily, comptime provides a solution there.

TBH I think "you just don't" is a pretty unsatisfying answer to "how do I use these features that are built into Zig" — especially when you can use them, very easily.

[spiffyk]

I mean yes, you can pass functions as parameters in Zig, you can even define them inline if you wrap them in anonymous structs, but my point is that — in a language where this is supported somewhat properly — you would do this to improve readability with some sort of a fluent API. If you attempt to do it in status-quo Zig, readability will only suffer and you are still much better off doing it with for and/or while loops (depending on the data structure), especially when Zig has nice syntax sugar with payloads in both to support these.

edit: formatting

[Zambyte]

Zig definitely encourages an imperative style by design, but it does support function pointers, which can be used to implement a map function. I do think passing the field name of the node as a comptime []const u8 as an extra argument to map, filter, etc. would be the only way to implement a generic version of these functions.

The fact that these functions are already designed to be cumbersome to implement, I think that's fine? I have also yet to use a linked list in Zig anyways. It's probably better to use an array, slice, std.BoundedArray, std.ArrayList, std.SegmentedList, or std.MultiArrayList unless there is a specific reason that a linked list is the best option.