Thread

1. weinzierl · 1789830709 · focus · HN ↗

   Two additional points:

   1. Tooling (as an extension to the mentioned IDE support point). Zig and Rust are both praised for their tooling and I think rightfully so. The C/C++ interop story and the cross-compiling story in Zig are great. From the standpoint of a working practitioner though I think Rust is way ahead. Not surprising given that Zig is much younger, but something to keep in mind.

   2. Compile Time Stuff: Here Zig is praised and Rust not so much. I think this is undeserved. Rust has much higher aspirations for their compile time features, namely that outcome must be identical regardless when the code runs. This is a very useful property but makes the task much harder and fundamentally incomparable with Zig comptime.

   1. chaz72 · 1789830889 · focus · HN ↗

      Are you saying that you think that Zig does not produce identical outcomes for comptime code regardless of when the code runs? What do you mean?

      1. bruckie · 1789831226 · focus · HN ↗

         I assumed that it meant that if you ran code at compile time or at runtime, the results should be exactly the same given the same inputs.

         1. chaz72 · 1789831461 · focus · HN ↗

            And they believe Zig comptime wouldn’t do that? For the same inputs? I’d love an example.

            1. vlovich123 · 1789833886 · focus · HN ↗

               Traditional stuff in this space are:

               * floating point differences between the build machine and the target. By far the most common

               * endiannes - code assumes little median runs on big endian

               There’s other more subtle issues that can crop up but those are the big two.

               Not saying I agree though - those can happen anyway when you run on two different machines anyway.

               1. dnautics · 1789885280 · focus · HN ↗

                  Zig Comptime is softfloat

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