Show HN: Zig Topological Sort Library for Parallel Processing

I've been enjoying zig myself quite a bit, I'm fairly confident I could do some larger projects in it (excluding comptime since it's missing features I sorely need for some of my current projects.) I like it a bit more than C/C++ in a lot of cases, I need it to be pushed just a tiny bit further before I can really dedicate effort towards large projects in it. I was even curious if I could implement the features I need myself (there is even a proposal already), but got the answer "Just don't." (I don't blame andrew, he already has a lot on his plate and I'm a stranger to him.) So I'm at the point of either waiting for the feature or forking it, haven't decided what I'm going to do though.

More on topic for the project though, did you have any project ideas for this? I think I could use this for my opencv node editor, I just did the naive method of marking all outputs dirty as their inputs nodes got reprocessed. I assume this would fix the potential problem of recomputing a node twice? I also see you mention "Cycle detection and cycle reporting." but what specifically happens if I do have a cycle? Does it just give up or is it something like best effort?

Could you describe briefly what feature you are sorely missing?

I like the language intention but I can't get past the syntax.

For me it's all comptime stuff and it's kind of arbitrary things like parsing out the type information of a function doesn't include the name of the function parameters, but basically everything else that has a name has that information present in their info structure. The other thing is tags, being able to tag things that I can parse at compile time. I'm making something close to a database orm, (specifically it's spacetimedb, thought it'd be fun to use zig with). But information about things like primary keys, auto increments, constraints and similar all has to live in a different structure completely untied to the original struct or function. I'd like to be able to tie those things together easily to avoid mistakes and confusion. I have different workarounds that I've tried, but nothing that's universal for all my test cases.

For syntax there are a few things that I'm iffy on, but nothing that I'd consider a deal breaker. I found it very easy to read right out of the gate, which is basically the only thing I need to really learn a new language (probably the only reason I haven't learned rust yet.)

Thanks for the reply.

I totally understand how those two features could be useful.

For the parameter name feature, I can't imagine a strong reason for not implementing it (I mean, apart of "we have other stuff to prioritize").

For the tag I could see an attribute system like in C++ [0]

On a tangential topic, I believe that's exactly the Pandora box of meta-programming.

[0] https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/language/attributes#Explan...

I think at one point they rejected the idea, but I think it was from 2018 or so. The cpp attributes does seem like what I'd want, but yeah c++ compile time code isn't good enough for what I need.