1. rust didnt invent affine ownership. 2. It's possible to bolt on to other languages (see ada). zig in particular is easy (disclaimer: i think, i haven't implemented it yet)
> zig in particular is easy (disclaimer: i think, i haven't implemented it yet)
I guess it's "easy" compared to other languages - but if you think it's "easy", we have different definitions of "easy".
You could implement it, but it would look like efforts in Rust to get SPARK-like safety, and SPARK itself. It will essentially be a different language.
You will not be able to work seamlessly with any regular Zig code. That may or may not be a problem if you're willing to assume you can just use it all unsafely and it works enough that things are fine.
That's somewhat analogous to unsafe Rust. The difference with unsafe Rust is... That's a very small fraction of what you're using, not the vast majority of what you use.
When you use a Rust crate - you generally do not expect that it could have infinite race conditions. It may have some unsafe code, but that should be the exception, not the norm.
By all means, please build it. I'd consider using it [=
> You will not be able to work seamlessly with any regular Zig code. That may or may not be a problem if you're willing to assume you can just use it all unsafely and it works enough that things are fine.
that may be true, but it seems "not". to date, all of the patterns in zig-clr nudge you towards idiomatic zig and not away from it. i run tests on not-my-code (an unaltered version of an existing zig project -- you can see it's vendored in the "vendored/validate"), and it passes. still working through forestmq.
and I'm planning a mechanism to let you reach into a function and "oracle" its safety parameters, probably most useful when someone else has written code that you know is ok but you cant tell them "hey make this work to pass my linter"
Also remember that zig compiles as a single compilation unit so even if you draw in zig dependencies, unless they are hidden behind a .so, zig-clr will analyze the dependency code too.
By all means - reach out when it's ready and I'll give it a test.
I'm highly skeptical you can get it to work. If it was easy and optional and non-invasive and actually worked - the Zig team would almost certainly build it.
But, even if it just mostly works - that would still be very useful if it's non invasive.
2. The zig team is parsimonious about what they do and don't build. For example, they did not work on the language server, rather punting it to the community.
3. That you can do this with the zig compiler is a happy accident. The team was not designing towards this possibility, it's not really a part of the core zig ethos (and that's fine).
4. You certainly cannot do things exactly the way that rust does it without changing the language; because the rust conversation has sucked all of the air out of the discourse around safety, you really do have to make a paradigm shift away from "tagged ownership" to "data dependency tracking with ownership agnosticism" to do it with zig.
You either do it with Linear Types, Affine Types, or you have holes...
Or you've invented a novel new system and should be publishing white papers immediately.
You can do virtually everything Zig comptime does in Brute Force in C++23. If this was possible - completely, it would already be done for C++. You need to point out exactly what you can do in Zig that you can't in C that somehow magically makes this completely possible and bulletproof in Zig - otherwise, you have a "concept of a plan".
The reason Rust sucked the air out of the room is that people are much more interested in systems without holes than systems that mostly work, or partially solve small parts of the problem and/or rely on the developer getting it right.
its refinement types which are a "superset of affine types" iiuc (you can construct a refinement type system that can represent affine types, plus more).
there is nothing special about zig that makes it fundamentally possible in zig and impossible in C.
the difference is that compiler architecture, some language decisions, well-designed stdlib, not having to contend with past decisions of a committee that overweighted backwards compatibility, take it from "jesus christ this is too much of a pain in the ass to bother" to "oh theres actually a path forward for one person and an llm".
As a concrete example. In C there is no "anointed allocator", sure, most people use malloc/free, but a broadly useful analyzer needs to be able to contend with any of a billion different patterns, and "oops I forgot jemalloc's mallocx" is not really okay (plus you gotta deal with weird things like errno, etc, and maybe some program uses jemalloc's free in some places and stdlib free in other places, how do you track that). In zig, sure, you could build a function that allocates off the stdlib path, but it's not unreasonable to "ban" that and force people to use the stdlib interface, and most dependencies will be compliant. Hopefully you can see how this "jesus christ i don't want to deal with all that" vs "a clean path forward".
I guess it's "easy" compared to other languages - but if you think it's "easy", we have different definitions of "easy".
You could implement it, but it would look like efforts in Rust to get SPARK-like safety, and SPARK itself. It will essentially be a different language.
You will not be able to work seamlessly with any regular Zig code. That may or may not be a problem if you're willing to assume you can just use it all unsafely and it works enough that things are fine.
That's somewhat analogous to unsafe Rust. The difference with unsafe Rust is... That's a very small fraction of what you're using, not the vast majority of what you use.
When you use a Rust crate - you generally do not expect that it could have infinite race conditions. It may have some unsafe code, but that should be the exception, not the norm.
By all means, please build it. I'd consider using it [=