[pron]

But arenas have substantial benefits. They may be one of the few remaining reasons to use a low-level (or "systems programming") language in the first place. Most things are tradeoffs, and the question isn't what you're giving up, but whether you're getting the most for what you're paying.

[pjmlp]

Arenas are also available in languages with automatic memory management, e.g. D, C# and Swift, to use only modern languages as example.

Thus I don't consider that a reason good enough for using Zig, while throwing away the safety from modern languages.

[pron]

First, Zig is more modern than any of the languages you mention. Second, I'm not aware that any of those languages offer arenas similar in their power and utility to Zig's while offering UAF-freedom at the same time. Note that "type-safe" arenas are neither as powerful as general purpose arenas nor fully offer UAF-freedom. I could be wrong (and if I am, I'd really love to see an arena that's both general and safe), but I believe that in all these languages you must compromise on either safety or the power of the arena (or both).

[metaltyphoon]

> First, Zig is more modern than any of the languages you mention

How so? This feels like an empty statement at best.

[pron]

"modern: relating to the present or recent times as opposed to the remote past". I agree it's not a useful concept here but I didn't bring it up. Specifically, I don't think there's any consideration that had gone into the design of D, C#, or Rust that escaped Zig's designer. He just consciously made different choices based on the data available and his own judgment.

[pjmlp]

Not really modern, it is Object Pascal/Modula-2 repackaged in C like syntax.

The only thing relatively modern would be compile time execution, if we forget about how long some languages have had reader macros, or similar capabilities like D's compile time metaprogramming.

Also it is the wrong direction when the whole industry is moving into integrity by default on cyber security legislation.

There are several examples around of doing arenas in said languages.

https://dlang.org/phobos/std_experimental_allocator.html

You can write your own approach with the low level primitives from Swift, or ping back into the trusty NSAutoreleasePool.

One example for C#, https://github.com/Enichan/Arenas

[pron]

> Not really modern, it is Object Pascal/Modula-2 repackaged in C like syntax.

That's your opinion, but I couldn't disagree more. It places partial evaluation as its biggest focus more so than any other language in history, and is also extraordinarily focused on tooling. There isn't any piece of information nor any technique that was known to the designers of those older languages and wasn't known to Zig's designer. In some situations, he intentionally chose different tradeoffs on which there is no consensus. It's strange to insist that there is some consensus when many disagree.

I have been doing low-level programming (in C, C++, and Ada in the 90s) for almost 30 years, and over that time I have not seen a low-level language that's as revolutionary in its approach to low-level programming as Zig. I don't know if it's good, but I find its design revolutionary. You certainly don't have to agree with my assessment, but you do need to acknowledge that some people very much see it that way, and don't think it's merely a "repackaged" Pascal-family language in any way.

I guess you could say that you personally don't care about Zig's primary design points and when you ignore them you're left with something that you find similar to other languages, but that's like saying that if you don't care about Rust's borrow- and lifetime checking, it's basically just a mix of C++ and ML. It's perfectly valid to not care about what matters most to some language's designer, and it's perfectly valid to claim that what matters to them most is misguided, but it is not valid to ignore a language's design core when describing it just because you don't care about it.

> Also it is the wrong direction when the whole industry is moving into integrity by default on cyber security legislation.

Again, that is an opinion, but not one I agree with. For one, Rust isn't as safe as other safe languages given its relatively common reliance on unsafe. If spatial and temporal memory safety were the dominating concerns, there wouldn't be a need for Rust, either (and it wouldn't have exposed unsafe). Clearly, everyone recognises that there are other concerns that sometimes dominate, and it's pretty clear that some people, who are no less knowledgeable about the software industry and its direction, prefer Zig. There is no consensus here either way, and I'm not sure there can be one. They are different languages that suit different people/projects' preferences.

Now, I agree that there's definitely more motion toward more correctness - which is great! - and I probably wouldn't write a banking or healthcare system in Zig, but I wouldn't write it in Rust, either. People reach for low level languages precisely when there may be a need to compromise on safety in some way, and Rust and Zig make different compromises, both of which - as far as I can tell - can be reasonable.

> There are several examples around of doing arenas in said languages.

From what I can tell, all of them either don't provide freedom from UAF, or they're not nearly as general as a proper arena.

I know of one safe and general arena design in RTSJ, which immidiately prevents a reference to a non-enclosing arena from being written into an object, but it comes with a runtime cost (which makes sense for hard realtime, where you want to sacrifice performance for worst-case predictability).

[pjmlp]

> You certainly don't have to agree with my assessment, but you do need to acknowledge that some people very much see it that way, and don't think it's merely a "repackaged" Pascal-family language in any way.

My opinion is that 99% of those people never knew anything beyond C and C++ for systems programming, and even believe the urban myth that before C there were no systems programming languages.

Similar to those that only discover compiled languages and type systems exist, after spending several years with Python and JavaScript, and then even Go seems out of this world.

[pron]

I don't know about the numbers. Some of Zig's famous proponents are Rust experts. I don't know the specific percentages, but you could level a similar accusation at Rust's proponents, too, i.e. that they have insufficient exposure to alternative techniques. And BTW, Zig's approach is completely different from that of C, C++, Rust, or the Pascal family languages. So if we were to go by percentages, we could dismiss all criticisms against Zig on the same basis (i.e. most people may think it's like C++, or C, or Modula, but since it isn't, then their criticisms are irrelevant). In fact, because Rust is a fairly old language and Zig isn't, it's more likely that more Zig developers are familiar with Rust than vice-versa.

But also I don't see why that even matters. If even some people with a lot of experience in other approaches to systems programming and even with experience with deeper aspects of software correctness accept this assessment, then you can't waive it away. It's okay to think we're wrong - after all no one has the sufficient empirical evidence to support their claim either way - but you cannot ignore the fact that some of those with extensive experience disagree with you, just as I'm happy to accept that some of them disagree with me.

[defen]

Wouldn't C# and Swift make it tough to integrate with other languages? Whereas something written in Zig (or Rust) can integrate with anything that can use the C ABI?

[pyrolistical]

Both c# and swift have first party c abi integration