Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by aystatic 35 days ago
That's a hell of a lot more than "basic extrapolation." You're misrepresenting the original claim to fight against one that's trivially easy to dispute. "Bun has had an extremely high amount of crashes/memory bugs due to them using Zig" (which unlike Rust, doesn't prevent you from writing them) is a completely different statement than your "using Zig results in an extremely high amount of crashes/bugs." Implying that such a generalization was even on the table is insulting.

Yes, obviously you can write high-quality software in Zig. But does Zig categorically reject the kind of bugs Bun was suffering from? Rust does.
1 comments
mort96 35 days ago
The point is that the "extremely high amount of crashes/bugs" is maybe not the fault of Zig after all, as was implied.
link
fastball 35 days ago
How software behaves is very obviously downstream of the tools (in this case programming language) used to build it.
link
mort96 35 days ago
"Downstream of" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Language has an effect on, but in no way determines, the reliability of software written in it.
link
fastball 35 days ago
Downstream doesn't imply determinism.
link
mort96 35 days ago
The original claim is one of determinism. Your use of the term "downstream" is hiding the distinction; it can be read in either way, so it bridges the gap between the position you want to defend ("using Zig causes a higher probability of memory bugs") and the position you're forced to defend ("using Zig results in extremely many memory bugs").

In short, I'm accusing you of doing a motte-and-bailey.

link
fastball 33 days ago
It's not deterministic, it's probabilistic. Bun does have memory bugs that would not be there if they'd written in safe Rust instead of Zig. You could imagine a scenario where ZigBun has zero memory issues, but it is not the most likely outcome, and is arguably an incredibly unlikely outcome given the entire history of software written in memory-unsafe languages.

I am less motte-and-bailey'ing, and you are more not subscribing to the principal of charity, choosing to interpret the original comment as its weakest possible version rather than the strongest.

link