Is zig lang stable enough now to start basing real projects on it?
replies(6):
I've found that LLMs are particularly bad at writing Zig because the language evolves quickly, so LLMs that are trained on Zig code from two years ago will write code that no longer compiles on modern Zig.
these seem to occur only in college assignment projects, and in the output of text generators trained on those.
In my experience, when you work with something like agentic development tools, you describe your goals and give it some constraints like “use modern zig”, “always run tests”… and when you ask it to write a README, it will usually reproduce those constraints more or less verbatim.
The same thing happens with the features section, it reads like instructions for an LLM.
I might be wrong but I spend way too much time using Claude, Gemini, Codex… and IMHO it’s pretty obvious.
But hey, I don’t think it’s a problem! I write a lot of code using LLMs, mostly for learning (and… ejem, some of it might end up in production) and I’ve always found them great tools for learning (supposing you use the appropriate context engineering and make sure the agent has access to updated docs and all of that). For example, I wanted to learn Rust so I half-vibed a GPUI-based chat client for LLMs that works just fine and surprisingly enough, I actually learned and even had some fun.
I put such emojis at the beginning of big headings, because my eyes detect compact shapes and colors faster than entire words and sentences. This helps me (and hopefully others) locate the right section easier.
In Slack, I put large emojis at the beginning of messages that need to stand out. These are few, and emojis work well in this capacity.
(Disclaimer: I may contain a large language model of some kind, but very definitely I cannot be reduced to it in any area of my activity.)
It has little step-by-step tasks with automated tests. There are some other good ones like git and docker. It's pretty cool.
There seems to be a fair amount of stigma around using llms. And many people that use them are uncomfortable talking about it.
It's a weird world. Depending on who is at the wheel, whether an llm is used _can_ make no difference.
But the problem is, you can have no idea what you're doing and make something that feels like it was carefully hand-crafted by someone - a really great project - but there are hidden things or outright lies about functionality, often to the surprise of the author. Like, they weren't trying to mislead, just didn't take them time to see if it did all of what the LLM said it did.
Something like LevelDB is relatively easy to write. Then you can build the rest of Redis on top of it.
also operators and integer types are unambiguous, and there is no UB in safe compilation modes.
It's arguably much better than C, not "slightly better than C"
So, there's another project – called kvrocks https://github.com/apache/kvrocks , which is for people which don't need in-memory perf of redis but would like to use its protocol and be still very performant. However, its devs never packaged a release in deb and other formats.
So, if you were to implement something similar ^ which will implement the protocol, have ability to grow on disk, and be available in distro repos (ideally) – would definitely hold a niche of many little projects which benefit from redis-like thing I've done.
idk if redis labs (the organization aka big bad) are going to patent the “protocol” to disallow clones (or they’d be going after valkey first)
another major drawbacks of Redis is that It is single threaded and sync. you need expensive high frequency CPU if you need more performance. something that could benefit from multi core system and if you would want to use disk cache async is a must. single threading also affects scripts running on Redis side, when they execute whole Redis is waiting and is unable to fulfil other requests.
another place for improvement would be proper easier to use HA, and maybe also auto scaling.
I think it is not inherently a bad thing to use LLMs, only if you have absolutely no clue about what you are doing, but even then, if the project is usable and as-is advertised, why not? shrugs
As for the link, that is exactly the same code that caught my eye, besides the README.md itself. The LRU eviction thing is what GPT (and possibly other LLMs) always comes up with according to my experiences, and he could have just had it properly implemented then. :D
Edit: I am glad author confirmed the use of an LLM. :P
Redis-compatible protocol guarantees that you can think about the things you've mentioned later. If project is successful – you'll find money to pay for RAM and move to pure Redis. If it's CPU-bound – you'll find multi-threaded alternatives.
So this is a pretty nice niche IMO actually.
As I wrote in another comment, it is not inherently a bad thing. I use LLMs too (while knowing what I am doing), and if the project works, why not?
If you know what you are doing then you already know the answer.
It is ok if you are fine with updating things every once in a while and you don’t use stdlib except maybe hashmap, hash functions, crypto etc.