[SoraNoTenshi]

I am not entirely sure what the Author is criticizing? It looks like a comparison to Odin rather than any critic.

And also: I don't quite understand most of the Arguments. UB is often a way to ensure that certain optimizations can be made (if i remember correctly.) Also there just are certain facts that when you have full control over memory, some things can just not be predictable. (Accessing invalid pointers as an example)

Verbosity is mostly subjective. Most of Author's concerns were path lengths, which can easily be "fixed" by redefining the path into a constant. `const debug = std.debug;` I also think the Argument towards "it looks like java's println" full on is a bad argument. Especially because `std.debug.print` does something completely different.

The whole "critic" towards `build.zig` also seems like it's done with without good faith. Yes it's daunting at first. Yes it requires to learn about the build system in the beginning. Sure those are all very real Arguments, author just doesn't want to mention the benefits of it.

Then half of the arguments about comptime i also don't quite understand. It seems like it is building up the main point of the argument, but then you just get hit by a statement. So no explanation no nothing. Talking about lazy evaluation and a little bit of how SoA makes things worse (which i have no clue how that matters in this context) and then saying it's violation "no hidden control flow" is not really getting the point i feel like.

[90s_dev]

> The whole "critic" towards `build.zig` also seems like it's done with without good faith. Yes it's daunting at first. Yes it requires to learn about the build system in the beginning. Sure those are all very real Arguments, author just doesn't want to mention the benefits of it.

He just pointed out to us language skimmers that it's a potential chicken egg problem, which we may not have considered. Perfect for this kind of article. Whereas pointing out its merits would just be recreating part of ziglang.org

[SoraNoTenshi]

I mean reading through the article it was only considering author's present perception which is a bit too naïve in my opinion.

Out of my head, the benefits of having a `build.zig` that you learn right from the get go is, that you kind of have to dig a bit into the eco-system a bit. Also how the buildsystem works, etc. which then in return makes it muuuuch easier later on if you have a bigger project, to properly utilize the power of the buildsystem.

I can also only consider my perspective here, but I've done quite a bit of Rust now (and work with it for over a year now, full time as well), and i can tell you as much: I would be thrown into icy waters if i need to do anything with a build.rs.

[aeonik]

Well theoretically if you compiled the whole system with Zig or Rust, you could eliminate that undefined behavior of invalid pointers right?

You'd need an OS that supports it, but it seems viable that the OS using allocators could know what happens at any given pointer.

To do it statically though, and with enough detail, I suppose it would take something like Idris with dependent types, and I'd imagine at that point it would be a pretty tough exercise.

[SoraNoTenshi]

I think that'd require a different Datatype than a Raw pointer. Allocating heap memory is a side-effect that's not really predictable, if you take all the factors into account. However i can see a world where this may be possible because of virtual memory, but i don't know how.

Dependent Types could help, although i am unsure if it helps with raw pointers.