[dnautics]

> the Zig team would almost certainly build it

1. It's a small team.

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.

[onlyrealcuzzo]

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.

I hope you're right, but hope is a bad strategy.

[dnautics]

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".