> Instead of debating for years (like other languages), zig just tries things out.
Good
> Worst case you can always rollback changes.
No, you cannot. People will leave in masses. In perl they announced experiments with a mandatory use experimental :feature. You couldnt publish modules with those, or else you are at risk.
This made perl exciting and fresh. Python on the other hand constantly broke API's, and had to invent package version locks and "safe" venv's. Which became unsafe of course.
Languages and stdlib are not playgrounds. We see what came out of it with C and C++ with horrible mistakes getting standardized.
I thought it was stable enough initially but they completely broke fuzz testing feature and didn’t fix it.
Also build system API and some other APIs change and it is super annoying.
Find it much better to use c23 with _BitInt integers and some macros and context passing for error handling.
Also some things like stack traces were broken in small ways in zig. It would report wrong lines in stack traces when compiling with optimizations. Also wasn’t able to cleanly collect stack traces into strings in production build.
It is understandable that breaking APIs is good for development but in most cases new API isn’t that good anyway.
And recently saw they even moved the time/Instant API to some other place too. This kind of thing is just super annoying with seemingly no benefit. Could have left the same API there and re-used it from somewhere else. But no, have to make it “perfect”
It sounds like you expected 1.0 stability from a language that isn't 1.0.
> I thought it was stable enough initially but they completely broke fuzz testing feature and didn’t fix it.
From the 0.14.0 release notes:
> Zig 0.14.0 ships with an integrated fuzzer. It is alpha quality status, which means that using it requires participating in the development process.
How could we possibly have been more explicit?
Fuzzing will be a major component of Zig's testing strategy in the long term, but we clearly haven't had the time to get it into shape yet. But we also didn't claim to have done!
> Also some things like stack traces were broken in small ways in zig. It would report wrong lines in stack traces when compiling with optimizations. Also wasn’t able to cleanly collect stack traces into strings in production build.
I mean, to be fair, most compiled languages can't give you 100% accurate source-level stack traces in release builds. But that aside, we have actually invested quite a lot of effort into std.debug in the 0.16.0 release cycle, and you should now get significantly better and more reliable stack traces on all supported platforms. If you encounter a case where you don't, file a bug.
> And recently saw they even moved the time/Instant API to some other place too. This kind of thing is just super annoying with seemingly no benefit. Could have left the same API there and re-used it from somewhere else. But no, have to make it “perfect”
I acknowledge that API churn can be annoying, but it would be weird not to aim for perfection prior to 1.0.
I'm not sure about that and if it is so, it's very recent. Playing online isn't bad and addictive per say I would argue though.
My comment was more in response to someone who seemed to associate chess to the main online platform which to me, is using addictive patterns to some level.
No, the coolest thing about tcc is that it is developed successfully wiki-style. Everybody can commit to the main branch (called mob). And it only gets better. No cooperation would allow that.
reply