Comment by japhib | Hacker News Reader

Comment by japhib | Hacker News Reader

I used Zig for a couple of Advent of Code problems last year. I decided that Zig is not a language I’m going to be using. Here’s why:

- If you ever want to allocate memory, you have to pass in an allocator to the function doing the allocating. You also have to explicitly allocate and deallocate.

- Zig has no concept of a string - it’s just a slice of bytes. This also means Zig has no support for string concatenation, UTF-8, regex, or any of the other many niceties we’ve come to expect as standard.

Zig is not the next Rust or the next C++ - it’s very much the next C.

Zig may be fine for people programming an OS or very highly performance sensitive application. But it’s too low level, and too obtuse about being low-level, for me to ever want to actually use it.

- Passing the allocator gives the user of the container control over where memory is allocated and the scheme used to clean it all up. You can always set a global allocator if you wish, nothing forces you to use it as a parameter.

- Regex can be provided as a library and specialized at comptime. There's never been a need for regex to be part of a primitive type and many other languages do fine without it. Concatenation is a question of "where do you allocate memory" as you have explicit allocation it's not clear what zig should do with it thus the default is to let you call std.mem.concat and dealing with the possible failure or having a look at the problem and asking if you really need concat in the first place. Often you don't as formatting string is better done with std.fmt and ArrayList(u8)'s writer().

> Zig has no concept of a string - it’s just a slice of bytes. This also means Zig has no support for ... regex

I used to think the same thing but it makes sense that for a finite state machine, the matcher doesn't need to work with validated strings at all.

You should read the first 2 paragraphs of burntsushi's (wrote rust regex implementation and a lot more) doc comment here: https://docs.rs/bstr/latest/bstr/#when-should-i-use-byte-str...

>t’s very much the next C

And that is great, once Zig is fully settled down we need something like Objective-Zig, or may be call it Zag.

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