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0 pointsricardobeat3y ago0 comments

It wouldn't exist any other way, the story is that it was built with speed as a priority, and Zig was chosen for the performance optimizations it enables.

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Buttons8403y ago

There are several other languages that could achieve the same speed and performance optimizations. To be clear, I hope to see Zig succeed and I'd like to learn it one day. It reminds me of the video game engine question, only in this case it would be: do you want to build a product, or do you want to build something with Zig? I imagine the creators of Bun answered "we want to use Zig" as their first priority, and that's great, I hope they have fun.

ojosilva3y ago

At one point, the Rust team switched away from the performant Jemalloc allocator to something more widely compatible (the system default). They chose to sacrifice performance in the sake of compatibility/stability. It's still available, but optional.

https://internals.rust-lang.org/t/jemalloc-was-just-removed-...

Insane performance gains, like the ones we see early in Zig, is something that can be easily eaten away by the natural evolution and maturity of a programming language.

Btw, Zig is beating trees with a stick to see what may fall down in this area: https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/12484

AndyKelley3y ago

Zig, unlike C++ and Rust, doesn't need an optimized general purpose allocator in order to be fast. Zig outperforms its peers despite currently having a slow GPA in the standard library because the language encourages programmers down a path that avoids boxing the shit out of everything, which is inherently slow even if you have a global allocator optimized for this use case.

Rust switched away from Jemalloc because it uses global allocation for everything. Zig's convention of explicit allocator argument passing means such a compromise will never be needed.

As for "beating trees with a stick", I'll probably end up doing what I did for WebAssembly, which is to ignore the preexisting work and make my own thing that is better. Here's my 160-line wasm-only allocator that achieves the trifecta: high performance, tiny machine code size, and fundamentally simple.

https://github.com/ziglang/zig/blob/c1add1e19ea35b4d96fbab31...

iExploder3y ago

my impression is Zig wants to replace C and has the same philosophy of a very simple language that does not evolve once it stabilizes. that means to me they want to stabilize the language with small amount of features and make it as performant as possible at that point. from their webpage:

A Simple Language

Focus on debugging your application rather than debugging your programming language knowledge.

spacechild13y ago

> with speed as a priultimat

They could have just used C++ or Rust. Not saying that they shouldn't use Zig, just questioning speed as the (primary) motivation

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