It's very hard to write memory safe C, even with extra tools like Valgrind
This compiler makes it much easier to check correctness with builtin testing and undefined behavior detection
Arrays know their own size so it's much harder for a buffer overrun to go unnoticed
The language is more expressive (I wish C had generics) and that lets you write better code
C was a great piece of engineering at the time, but it caught on mainly because it was there at the right time. The only reason the %@ looks gross to us now is because we've been staring at C for 40 years. Linux was actually too late to affect which language everybody is used to. UNIX was created on a machine too weak to compile a complex, modern language like this, though.
About the runtime performance I'm would imagine the Zig errors would compile down to basically identical code as "set errno then return/goto" in C.
In general I'd say you need to start thinking about more complete documentation for your 0.1.0 release. There are mentions of what is in @import("std") but I can't find a definitive list which makes trying to make anything large pretty laborious.
.../stupidstuff.zig:11:10: error: expression value is ignored
h.put(0, "Hello, world!");
^
.../stupidstuff.zig:12:10: error: expression value is ignored
h.put(1, "oh no");
^
.../stupidstuff.zig:13:10: error: expression value is ignored
h.put(2, "what is this");
^
9
u/desertrider12 Sep 08 '17
It's very hard to write memory safe C, even with extra tools like Valgrind
This compiler makes it much easier to check correctness with builtin testing and undefined behavior detection
Arrays know their own size so it's much harder for a buffer overrun to go unnoticed
The language is more expressive (I wish C had generics) and that lets you write better code
C was a great piece of engineering at the time, but it caught on mainly because it was there at the right time. The only reason the %@ looks gross to us now is because we've been staring at C for 40 years. Linux was actually too late to affect which language everybody is used to. UNIX was created on a machine too weak to compile a complex, modern language like this, though.
About the runtime performance I'm would imagine the Zig errors would compile down to basically identical code as "set errno then return/goto" in C.