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0 points9d11mo ago0 comments

Andrew has so many wrong takes. Unused variables is another.

Such a smart guy though, so I'm hesitant to say he's wrong. And maybe in the embedded space he's not, and if that's all Zig is for then fine. But internal code is a necessity of abstraction. I'm not saying it has to be C++ levels of abstraction. But there is a line between interface and implementation that ought to be kept. C headers are nearly perfect for this, letting you hide and rename and recast stuff differently than your .c file has, allowing you to change how stuff works internally.

Imagine if the Lua team wasn't free to make it significantly faster in recent 5.4 releases because they were tied to every internal field. We all benefited from their freedom to change how stuff works inside. Sorry Andrew but you're wrong here. Or at least you were 4 years ago. Hopefully you've changed your mind since.

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philwelch11mo ago

> I'm not saying it has to be C++ levels of abstraction. But there is a line between interface and implementation that ought to be kept. C headers are nearly perfect for this, letting you hide and rename and recast stuff differently than your .c file has, allowing you to change how stuff works internally.

Can’t you do this in Zig with modules? I thought that’s what the ‘pub’ keyword was for.

You can’t have private fields in a struct that’s publicly available but the same is sort of true in C too. OO style encapsulation isn’t the only way to skin a cat, or to send the cat a message to skin itself as the case may be.

9dOP11mo ago

I don't know Zig so I dunno maybe

haberman11mo ago

I agree with almost all of this, including the point about c header files, except that code has to be in headers to be inlined (unless you use LTO), which in practice forces code into headers even if you’d prefer to keep it private.

keldaris11mo ago

There's nothing wrong with using LTO, but I prefer simply compiling everything as a single translation unit ("unity builds"), which gets you all of the LTO benefits for free (in the sense that you still get fast compile times too).

girvo11mo ago

> But internal code is a necessity of abstraction

I just fundamentally disagree with this. Not having "proper" private methods/members has not once become a problem for me, but overuse of them absolutely has.

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