Not a comment on the book but I hope a slightly off topic thread is OK...
As a systems programmer, what is the selling point of Zig? For me, memory safety is the number 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 problem with C. A new language that doesn't solve those problems seems very strange to me. And as a counterpoint, I will tolerate massive number of issues with Rust because it gives us memory safety.
I work in security so that may give me a bias. But maybe instead of "bias" it's more like awareness. If you don't deal with it day in, day out, it seems impossible to really internalise how completely fucking broken something like the Linux kernel is. Continuing to write e.g. driver code in an unsafe language is just not acceptable for our civilisation.
But, also maybe you don't need full complete memory safety, if a language has well designed abstractions maybe it can just be "safe enough in practice". I've worked on C++ code that feels that way. Is this the deal with Zig?
As a systems programmer, what is the selling point of Zig? For me, memory safety is the number 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 problem with C. A new language that doesn't solve those problems seems very strange to me. And as a counterpoint, I will tolerate massive number of issues with Rust because it gives us memory safety.
I work in security so that may give me a bias. But maybe instead of "bias" it's more like awareness. If you don't deal with it day in, day out, it seems impossible to really internalise how completely fucking broken something like the Linux kernel is. Continuing to write e.g. driver code in an unsafe language is just not acceptable for our civilisation.
But, also maybe you don't need full complete memory safety, if a language has well designed abstractions maybe it can just be "safe enough in practice". I've worked on C++ code that feels that way. Is this the deal with Zig?