by com2kid 7 hours ago
The mentality around lifetimes is different in Zig if you are using it for the correct types of problems.
For example, a command line utility. In a CLI tool you typically don't free memory. You just allocate and exit and let the OS clean up memory.
Historically compilers were all like this, they didn't free memory, they just compiled a single file and then exited! This ended up being a problem when compilers moved more into a service model (constant compilation in the background, needing to do whole program optimization, loading into memory and being called on demand to compile snippets, etc), but for certain problem classes, not worrying about memory safety is just fine.
Zig makes it easy to create an allocator, use it, then just free up all the memory in that region.
Right tool for the job and all that.
I've been having an absolutely great time with Rust's bumpalo crate, which works very similarly. The lifetime protection still works great, and it's actually a lot more permissive than normal Rust, since it's the same lifetime everywhere.
The sad exception is obviously that Rust's std collections are not built on top of it, and neither is almost anything else.
But nevertheless, I think this means it's not a Zig vs Rust thing, it's a Zig stdlib vs Rust stdlib thing, and Rust's stdlib can be replaced via #[no_std]. In the far future, it's likely someone will make a Zig-like stdlib for Rust too, with a &dyn Allocator inside collections.
> In the far future, it's likely someone will make a Zig-like stdlib for Rust too, with a &dyn Allocator inside collections.
This exists in the nightly edition of Rust, but is unlikely to become a feature in its current form because the alternative of "Storages" seems to be a lot more flexible and to have broader applicability.
I'm not convinced that you can't borrow check in zig... (disclaimer, i'm working on compile time memory safety for zig)
I had no idea you were working on Zig dnautics.
If you were to add borrow checking to Zig, it would make it much easier to justify using it at my current workplace.
clarifying: It's just an experiment for zig PL, not affiliated with zsf:
http://github.com/ityonemo/clr
was where i got last year. this december im doing a "prototype" which means its going to be done in zig and im going to clear sone difficult hurdles i couldn't do last year.... also accepting sponsors, details on page.
also disclaimer, im using heavy amounts of ai assistance (as implied in the preview video)