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by lelanthran 16 days ago
> Ironically, the 'no hidden control flow' was one of the arguments against Zig in the recent Bun rewrite to Rust.

Yeah, but that makes sense: if you want "hidden everything", which they appear to want due to now having a code base that has never been read by a human, then a subset of "want everything hidden" is "want control flow hidden".
1 comments
himata4113 16 days ago
Honestly I am pretty sure AI would be better at zig than rust since zig has no hidden control flow which means that AI has the full context of any given function without having to find traits. The rewrite to rust from bun is as much of as PR stunt as fustration with DX of zig.

Every time I want to interact with zig code I just have the AI do it since I honestly can't be asked to change 3 lines and around 3 to 5 characters when it's a single keybind in every other language which in turn has lead me to experiment quite a lot 'writing' in zig. It's rather pleasant to look at, however, I wouldn't want to write code myself.

Rust is by far the most enjoyable dx experience since everything usually 'just works' across machines and even architectures while having a strong sense of assurance that compiled applications will work as expected before ever running them once. node/bun/whatever is probably the worst here since compilation means nothing for runtime as undefined symbols will happily 'compile' (transpile?).

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chrisjj 16 days ago
> Honestly I am pretty sure AI would be better at zig than rust since zig has no hidden control flow which means that AI has the full context of any given function without having to find traits.

You say that as if having to find traits was a problem ... for a bot.

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himata4113 16 days ago
Traits are harder to find since multiple traits can apply, but the one strictest one wins. They also have to be followed from generic types which adds a whole other layer of complexity, without an LSP it's a lost cause.
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chrisjj 16 days ago
> Traits are harder to find

Sure, but what matters is whether that's too hard for an "AI".

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himata4113 16 days ago
1 read vs realizing that lsp exists and using it correctly, even if ai is smart that's more token burn and it is slower making zig 'better'.

It also has to realize that "Drop" exists and know what it does since there's nothing in code that clearly says "this object is automatically dropped by the compiler on scope end.

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