Building a Better C with Loris Cro from Zig Software Foundation
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 14 ต.ค. 2024
- Zig is a new programming language with big ambitions: to be a better C. Loris Cro is the VP of Community at the Zig Software Foundation, and he takes us through the ins and outs of Zig -- how was it created, what problems is it trying to solve, and where is it being used.
We heard Joran Dirk Greef rave about Zig during our TigerBeetle episode, and there are a lot of passionate Zig fans out there. Zig has some really unique aspects, particularly the comptime keyword that allows for running arbitrary code at compile time.
We also talk about Loris's background and his rapid rise to lead marketing for a software foundation. Loris talks about how he got there, how Zig things about community, and how they're working to make Zig sustainable.
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is learning zig a good investment for early/mid career devs?
Not if you're looking for a job as it's job market is almost non-existent for now. In the future, who knows.
Not really. It's still a tiny language
That is the wrong question to ask.
Learning the concepts of programming and computer science is the most important, not a specific language.
yes, pasoori bro @@tinky3110
Are you adding a 3D game dev library for Zig?
Mach: Zig game engine & graphics toolkit
Zig is not 3d dev language, it's general purpose programming language, no specific stuff for 3d is in Zig, just like in C. For this you can use Mach engine, that is written in Zig.
Zig is also very good for using C libraries. You therefore have very easy access to libs like SDL and raylib.
The question is what do you want for 3D ?
If you just want openGL + window/input/sound libs, SDL and raylib are fine. If you want a full game engine, I don't believe there is one out yet that can use it.
Remember Zig uses C abi, meaning if you could see a way of making something with C (such as adding a C library to do some specific processing), you could just build it in Zig.
Recently I got some bad C code generated by AI that was exploitable. If Zig has the same problem as C then I have no interest in Zig. It seems to be only perpetuating the problem by creating more exploitable code that is going to be fed into the LLMs, and now we're back where we started with the same old problem. Rust doesn't have this problem because the borrow checker forces AI to make good code. Zig is a big step backwards.
Don't use LLM generated code. Zig has mechanisms for checking common dynamic memory problems (use after free, and double free) with its standard library allocators. As far as I know it does array bounds checking. Short story is, if you want to use Rust, go right ahead; don't expect every other language to do what Rust does.
Don't use it no one forces just leave it for us
"the borrow checker forces AI to make good code" This is not at all true. It ensures the AI writes compilable code. I hope you are a student or hobbyist developer.
No, what are you talking about? You're the step backwards in this scenario? AI should NOT code for you. It's e mere assistans tool and if you can't validate if the code it spits out is any good or not, that's a skill issue on you my friend.
You don't think bad actors are going to inject bad code and get LLMs to do bad code? That's just silly. Vendor side-channel attacks are a thing. If there's a big enough target, then there's incentive to figure out how. Your only mitigation is to not use it with security critical pieces, simple.