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by dns_snek 293 days ago
That's a false dichotomy, I'll take minimal bitrotten docs in a community wiki over no docs. There's no excuse not to at least have a stub that says "these features are evolving quickly but here are 10 open source projects that should serve as good references".

Something - anything. As much as I like Zig, I dread returning to it after a few months of being out of the loop.

1 comments

It's not a false dichotomy, it's a bandwidth issue. I'd rather the core team focus on stuff like incremental compilation.
"No documentation" and "Core devs 'wasting' time on writing high quality documentation" aren't the only two options, that's what a false dichotomy means.

Other options include but are not limited to providing minimal, low effort examples, high-level overview, linking to projects using these features, linking to relevant tests, commits, or source code, setting up an official community wiki and encouraging people to contribute.

"No documentation" was never presented as an option. Documentation exists. By treating "insufficient docs" as "no docs", you're the one making the false equivalency.
> Documentation exists

Where does a beginner go to learn how to use the package manager these days? It looks like they still won't find any clues in the "Learn" section of Zig's website.

There's a promising page titled "Zig Build System" in there which references a "Package Management" section, but when you click on it, it doesn't exist!

So in your mind, one missing section means "no documentation"? This isn't the checkmate you think it is, you're just moving goalposts.

But to answer your question, it exists in the comments of the auto-generated build.zig.zon file

It's not just "one missing section", and we're not just talking about some fringe language feature but the build system which is probably the most complex, important, and under documented part of the language.

The official answer to complaints about missing documentation has always been "ask in Discord". Pretending that this isn't the case is just disingenuous.

> But to answer your question, it exists in the comments of the auto-generated build.zig.zon file

The comments document the file format of build.zig.zon, they don't tell you anything about how to actually use a dependency in your build system.

> you're just moving goalposts.

Pretty funny, coming from someone who went from "false dichotomy" to "the false equivalency".