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Things Zig comptime won't do

(matklad.github.io)
458 points JadedBlueEyes | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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no_wizard ◴[] No.43744932[source]
I like the Zig language and tooling. I do wish there was a safety mode that give the same guarantees as Rust, but it’s a huge step above C/C++. I am also extremely impressed with the Zig compiler.

Perhaps the safety is the tradeoff with the comparative ease of using the language compared to Rust, but I’d love the best of both worlds if it were possible

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ksec ◴[] No.43745418[source]
>but I’d love the best of both worlds if it were possible

I am just going to quote what pcwalton said the other day that perhaps answer your question.

>> I’d be much more excited about that promise [memory safety in Rust] if the compiler provided that safety, rather than asking the programmer to do an extraordinary amount of extra work to conform to syntactically enforced safety rules. Put the complexity in the compiler, dudes.

> That exists; it's called garbage collection.

>If you don't want the performance characteristics of garbage collection, something has to give. Either you sacrifice memory safety or you accept a more restrictive paradigm than GC'd languages give you. For some reason, programming language enthusiasts think that if you think really hard, every issue has some solution out there without any drawbacks at all just waiting to be found. But in fact, creating a system that has zero runtime overhead and unlimited aliasing with a mutable heap is as impossible as finding two even numbers whose sum is odd.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43726315

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spullara ◴[] No.43745791[source]
With Java ZGC the performance aspect has been fixed (<1ms pause times and real world throughput improvement). Memory usage though will always be strictly worse with no obvious way to improve it without sacrificing the performance gained.
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estebank ◴[] No.43747793{3}[source]
IMO the best chance Java has to close the gap on memory utilisation is Project Valhalla[1] which brings value types to the JVM, but the specifics will matter. If it requires backwards incompatible opt-in ceremony, the adoption in the Java ecosystem is going to be an uphill battle, so the wins will remain theoretical and be unrealised. If it is transparent, then it might reduce the memory pressure of Java applications overnight. Last I heard was that the project was ongoing, but production readiness remained far in the future. I hope they pull it off.

1: https://openjdk.org/projects/valhalla/

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1. spullara ◴[] No.43748268{4}[source]
Agree, been waiting for it for almost a decade.