randypewick
Joined 5 months ago
Joined 5 months ago
I can't find that talk again, but it was quite interesting: the rust compiler is fast, but often times it has to perform a lot of unnecessary checks because crates contain more stuff than needed. By stripping unnecessary work, the makepad team made building pretty fast.
Now I wonder what other donations were deemed as much as - or more - useful.
Arguably, there are important things that Zig devs are doing which are not "Zig dev made" (hence the "giants" I mentioned). NASA 10 rules are now rebranded as "tiger style" and marketed along Zig; Data Oriented Design existed before Zig; LLVM existed before Zig; the authors of gpui, the library that seems to have inspired gooey, apparently did a pretty great job (please correct me if I'm wrong, I don't do graphics, don't use gpui, this is what I understood when gpui came out).
I'm sure Zig devs made pretty great things, too! Does Zig make them apart? Do Zig attracts more capable devs than other languages, maybe? Genuine question!
In general, the article is ok-ish: it makes sense to think about the correctness (whatever that means... correct according to whom?), about the bugs (according to what specs?), the users (according to what use cases?). This is ill-defined and I don't like this framing. But even assuming I like the concept, why would the author say those things about rust specifically? This seems a bit like picking to me. Kind of not very honest, maybe?
I don't know or follow the author, just stumbled on this page because a colleague mentioned it, I don't know if there is a history of anti-rust'er or something, I just found something weird and sus.
But I'd rather celebrate high quality software than how the software is made.
I appreciate that people put the effort in what they do, but the effort could be spent on other activities that are not "typing".
What's so special about Zig dev that puts them aside from the giants they stand on?
I mean, if they really care about software correctness, I wonder why take a very discutibile position and say that "safety doesn't matter if you don't use the correct process". Yeah, I mean, having some guardrails is better than none, right? If they really cared about correctness, they would really strive to put all the possible guardrails in place, wouldn't they? Maybe they are bitter because their fav language is not as popular as the other?
But there are so many languages, I wonder why picking on Rust specifically.