Zig's Explicitness and C Interoperability Revolutionize Systems Programming

Key Quotes

"so i i never really so zig is a low level programming language so um you do systems programming stuff with it and um in university i studied bioinformatics so i never really got much into lower level programming except you know i had one course where uh we had to do some string algorithms in c because you know dma analysis wants you to do string algorithms fast uh but that that was it that was all the experience i had"

Loris Kro explains that Zig is a low-level programming language used for systems programming. Kro's personal background in bioinformatics and limited exposure to low-level programming before Zig highlights a potential barrier that Zig aims to lower for newcomers. This suggests Zig is designed to be more accessible than traditional low-level languages.

"so i was shopping for a language that would allow me to show how to do this stuff to people that would be less uh that would look less scary than c or c and i stumbled upon zig and uh i kind of fell in love with it and i started interacting with the zig community and then after a while i jumped ship and joined the zig software foundation"

Kro describes seeking a language less intimidating than C or C++ for demonstrating specific technical tasks. Kro's discovery of Zig led to a deep engagement with the language and its community, culminating in a career shift to the Zig Software Foundation. This illustrates Zig's appeal as a more approachable alternative for complex programming.

"and in a sense it's our superpower because it means that every time we realize that something needs to be tweaked we we you know we don't have to fight with legacy promises we can just break"

Kro discusses Zig's versioning strategy, where breaking changes are accepted in releases prior to version 1.0. Kro frames this ability to "break" code as a "superpower" for the development team. This indicates Zig prioritizes rapid iteration and improvement over strict backward compatibility in its early stages.

"my point i guess the reason why i told this story is that um in my experience c and c are full of these problems they're the way they work is uh it's like it's full of uh of rough corners that and you keep getting caught so if you're a uh a new programmer like for example thinking about my personal experience i was never i never got into lower level programming before discovering zig not because i i hated it i hated the idea i would have liked to learn more about lower level programming but my impression of the amount of effort necessary to navigate the complexity and the weird quirks of you know 40 years basically of accumulated stuff in the c and c world"

Kro shares a personal anecdote to illustrate the difficulties encountered when working with C and C++. Kro explains that the accumulated complexity and quirks of these older languages create significant hurdles for new programmers. This suggests Zig aims to provide a more manageable and less frustrating experience for systems programming.

"but if you have a c dependency in rust it's on you to make sure that that dependency compiles on all the different platforms and most importantly cross compilation is out of the question at that point unless you figure it out yourself how to cross compile the c part okay"

Kro contrasts Zig's capabilities with Rust's regarding C dependencies and cross-compilation. Kro highlights that while Rust handles its own cross-compilation, managing C dependencies for cross-compilation in Rust is the user's responsibility. This points to Zig's integrated tooling as a significant advantage for projects involving C codebases across multiple platforms.

"we have defer so uh cleaning up um you know resource allocation it's uh not as fully automated as it is with raii it's still a bit more manual but it's very nice to be able to allocate a resource and immediately defer free it or err defer so we have a variant of defer that only triggers when you are returning with an error and so that the idea is on success the resource needs to be returned to the caller on failure you want to free everything so you use err defer in that case"

Kro introduces Zig's defer and errdefer features for resource management. Kro explains that defer allows immediate resource cleanup upon function exit, while errdefer specifically handles cleanup when an error occurs. This demonstrates Zig's explicit control over resource management, offering a more controlled alternative to fully automated systems like RAII.

"the difference i guess is that on one hand the ifdef doesn't get syntax analyzed right you don't have to have correct syntax in there because it gets just chucked away but but that i think that's not a particularly interesting difference in the case of comptime i think there are other situations where this becomes where the sophistication that you get out of comptime becomes more evident"

Kro distinguishes Zig's comptime feature from C's #ifdef preprocessor directives. Kro suggests that while #ifdef simply removes code from compilation, comptime offers deeper sophistication by allowing the compiler to reason about code at compile time. This implies comptime provides more powerful compile-time code generation and analysis capabilities than traditional macros.

"it's easier to use c libraries from zig than from c itself that's pretty cool so you can add a zig compilation unit to a c c program you're out there you're listening to this podcast you've got a big c program and you're like ah i don't want to touch any of that you can drop zig in and it just works"

Kro makes a bold claim about Zig's C interoperability, stating it is easier to use C libraries from Zig than from C itself. Kro illustrates this by suggesting that a Zig compilation unit can be seamlessly integrated into an existing C program. This highlights Zig's design philosophy of facilitating integration with existing C codebases.