Zig: Upcoming release postponed two more weeks and lacks async functions

https://ziglang.org/news/0.11.0-postponed-again/

by manaskarekar • 3 years ago

160 61 3 years ago

mtlynch2• 3 years ago

I’m not on Twitter anymore - my goal is to instead channel that micro-blogging energy into regular blogging energy on my personal website as well as posting Zig project news here on ziglang.org.

Cool, I like this!

I realized last year that I was investing too much time into sharing things on Twitter that I'd subsequently forget about or be unable to find.

Instead, I created a separate section on my personal blog for "notes" where the idea is to house content that I'd otherwise post to Twitter. It's been working well, and I like owning my own content rather than contributing it to another platform.

I'm especially glad for this change after seeing what's happened in the past few months with Twitter and Reddit. It's been unfortunate to see those platforms become so much more possessive of the content that their users generated. If you publish to your own platform, you're safe from that. At least until LLMs bury your platform in noise.

Santosh83• 3 years ago

At least until LLMs bury your platform in noise.

Curious, but how exactly would they do that? Are you talking about scraping your website and adding garbage filler content from LLMs and republishing to divert traffic?

mtlynch2• 3 years ago

Oh, I just mean like filling the web with so much garbage that nobody can find your website.

Hamcha• 3 years ago

I'm also trying to do my part in fixing my own and many other's overreliance on reddit comments for everyday problem solving and advice. I decided that every time I would write an decently sized explanation of something on Discord/Telegram, I would instead write a post and link it.

To make it as convenient as possible (every amount of friction would eat at my motivation) I made it using Obsidian Digital Garden [1]. It's a bit of a hassle to set up and the UI is annoyingly bad but it's pretty convenient (boils down to click to publish) afterwards.

1. https://dg-docs.ole.dev/

Aldo_MX• 3 years ago

I really appreciate the honesty. It is not the end of the world to delay a highly anticipated feature, especially when the delay was a consequence of prioritizing the long-term stability of the codebase over the promised delivery date.

hinkley2• 3 years ago

There are costs to not shipping a feature you meant to ship. So we first get a bit of sunk cost fallacy, trying to stretch to meet the goal, then if we pull back we have to make sure the feature is either completely toggled off or reverted. And then you have to fix the docs, which is never a fast process. It always takes longer wall-clock time to do the grunt tasks than strictly necessary to perform the steps.

ksec• 3 years ago

Why Async, especially considering Zig intends to be something like a High Level "portable Assembly"?

laserbeam3• 3 years ago

Waiting for IO is never cool. Also, zig's version of async is pretty low level and still obeys the no hidden control flow mantra (at least how it was implemented until 0.9.0).

chubot• 3 years ago

How was it implemented in the past? Is there any overview of the design iterations Zig has gone through?

Seems like Rust is still working on this area with the controversial keyword generics

Dwedit• 3 years ago

How the heck would that even work...

In C#, they implement Await/Async by converting the function into a Class, just like when you use 'yield return'. Control flow is all over the place.

Zig is so strict about "no hidden control flow" that you can't even have destructors (code which runs when a variable goes out of scope)

himujjal• 3 years ago

Go through Zig’s Async. Its a bit like co-routines but low level. You are required to keep track of memory allocations and pointers to function “frames”. For someone coming from a high-level language POV, frames were a new concept. But Zig does it so superb.

Zig just needs some runtime event loop like Tokio or AsyncIO from Rust to get up and running with its fantastic async model.

Bigpet• 3 years ago

Having some form of coroutines or green threads seems like a good idea to me for something low-level. Otherwise countless projects that need something like it will re-implent their own incompable version with longjmp or similar means.

anonymoushn2• 3 years ago

Zig's async, like Lua's, lets people write libraries that are generic over async-ness by default. "dump my registers and jump to another stack" is also a legitimate move in assembly (though that's not how this implementation actually works).

formerly_proven• 3 years ago

I understand the technical reasons (caused by cultural reasons) why Python ended up with colored async but man oh man was it a bad choice for a high-overhead language to do that…

kissgyorgy2• 3 years ago

Zig's async implementation is the best of any languages, because you can run them without an event loop and in that case they will be simply synchronous. This completely eliminates the function coloring problem.

xxpor• 3 years ago

Usually the coloring problem IME goes the other way: you want to run a synchronous/blocking function in an async context. How does Zig deal with that?

dgb23• 3 years ago

Does that mean the return types are the same when you use async or not on the same function?

continuational• 3 years ago

It absolutely doesn't, because it changes the semantics of what's being called, introducing deadlocks.

pjmlp3• 3 years ago

Except Modula-2 and Concurrent Pascal, among several others did it first, in the 1970's.

pjmlp3• 3 years ago

Modula-2, Mesa, Concurrent Pascal, NEWP all had coroutines support, so actually that is something I like in Zig.

booniepepper• 3 years ago

An engineer being overly optimistic with a time estimate? Say it ain't so!

"A delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad." - Shigeru Miyamoto

The same goes for features. I'd rather Zig have a delayed/good async next year and forever after, instead of a rushed/bad async right this moment and forever after.

jokoon2• 3 years ago

I wish zig could be enabled for godot.

generichuman• 3 years ago

What do you mean by "enabled"? If you want to use Zig with Godot, you can! Just use GDExtension [0].

[0] https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/scripting/g...

jokoon2• 3 years ago

gdextensions are not easy to use

kristoff_it• 3 years ago

You might be interested in following the development of Mach Engine then.

https://machengine.org/

john_q_public• 3 years ago

I have yet to try Zig, but I approve of the idea of taking extra time and reducing scope to make sure that what you do ship is solid, especially in something like a programming language that may end up being a foundational piece of many other projects.

aserafini• 3 years ago

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again.

Andrew Kelley is the greatest, most productive Yak shaver of all time.

skywal_l• 3 years ago

I hope Andrew does a Stream of preparing the 0.11.0 migration documentation like he did for 0.10.0. It gives a good insight on the new features in a conversational manner.

chriswarbo3• 3 years ago

Is there a reason async/await is being implemented specifically, rather than some more generally-useful primitive (like delimited continuations, algebraic effect handling, functor/applicative/monad, etc.[0])?

When it comes to e.g. memory management, Zig tries to be unopinionated and allow different implementations to be implemented as desired; so it seems odd to bake-in something like async/await (even if the execution strategy of those computations is up to the user).

I've seen this happen in many high-level languages (JS, Python, PHP, etc.), which I mostly attribute to (a) ignorance of those generalisations, and (b) a band-wagon effect. The unfortunate result in those languages is a bloated mess of try/catch, async/await, for/yield, apply/return, etc. and all of their O(n!) possible interactions; which could have instead been implemented as libraries on top of a single primitive (e.g. shift/reset, or whatever)

[0]: AFAIK these are all equivalently expressive, and given one it's easy enough to write the others as libraries.

PS: I recall asking this question when PHP added generators; I can't seem to find a bug report or mailing list post though...

kprotty6• 3 years ago

Zig's async manages the coroutines intrusively: It generates the state machine type, you provide the memory for where an instance of one runs, and you manage resuming it until completion. Similar to Rust's Futures, it's pretty unopinionated in how you manage them so it works everywhere (i.e. freestanding). Could you clarify (or provide more reading on) how the other systems like delimited continuations, algebraic effects, and monads differ from Zig async + how they could be adapted in a similarly unopinionated/low-level way?

chriswarbo3• 3 years ago

Could you clarify (or provide more reading on) how the other systems like delimited continuations, algebraic effects, and monads differ from Zig async + how they could be adapted in a similarly unopinionated/low-level way?

The key requirement for all these is an ability/API to defer and resume execution (indeed, delimited continuations are sometimes described as "resumable exceptions"). In higher-level languages we'd just assume the presence of first-class functions/closures, and use those to describe these features. I'm less familiar with how that looks in a very low-level language like Zig, however these "async frames" appear (to my naïve eyes) to be analagous; hence why I'm interested whether one of those more-general primitives could be provided instead (the answer might be no!).

As for clarification on those features, here's a quick attempt. Firstly, note that all of these approaches are basically APIs to construct, consume, and combine (deferred) computations: they are unopinionated on how those computations get run (e.g. the user could supply a "main loop", or whatever).

Delimited continuations are like exceptions, except the stack (AKA continuation) is passed to the handler, which may choose to resume it. We can implement coroutines/async/yield/etc. by having handlers which put their continuation in a queue and pop off some other one to resume instead; we can get data parallelism by resuming a continuation many times; we can get backtracking by remembering old continuations and trying them again; we can get parsers, probabilistic programming, nondeterminism, etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delimited_continuation

Algebraic effects are similar, but defunctionalised: i.e. they represent control flow with datatypes, and are "interpreted" by a user-specified function.

Applicative is an API for combining two computations concurrently, e.g. the product of Foo and Bar is a single computation yielding a pair of results. Monad can likewise combine sequentially, where Bar depends on the result of Foo. These feel more abstract, but are equivalent to the above e.g. see https://okmij.org/ftp/continuations/implementations.html https://reasonablypolymorphic.com/#understanding-freer-monad...

chriswarbo3• 3 years ago

Zig: Upcoming release postponed two more weeks and lacks async functions

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