| ▲ | hresvelgr 21 hours ago |
| > You can just do that, and then Zig is really no less robust than Rust. That's just it, using Zig required more rigorous engineering than the Bun team were capable of. |
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| ▲ | rob74 21 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| People tried to "just do that" (write their programs in a memory safe way) in C and other languages with manual memory management for decades, and we have countless vulnerabilities that prove this simply doesn't work. That's why newer languages, with the notable exception of Zig, prefer more advanced memory management methods. |
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| ▲ | hresvelgr 18 hours ago | parent [-] | | > People tried to "just do that" (write their programs in a memory safe way) in C and other languages with manual memory management for decades, and we have countless vulnerabilities that prove this simply doesn't work. Who are these "people" you speak of? It's possible to write software in low level languages that don't have these problems. Not a "non-zero" it might be possible, it can be done thoughtfully, and the popular notion it can't be done is backed only by incomplete anecdotes. Should everything be written in low-level languages? No, that would be absurd. Is it a simple fact of life that not every person/team/organisation is capable of meeting certain standards of rigour? Yes. That's not to say anyone in the Bun team could not become sufficiently competent in the future. For whatever reason, current experience, incentives, and personal motivations did not make for a conducive environment to make Bun watertight in Zig. | | |
| ▲ | rob74 18 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Yes, it's possible. It's also possible for experienced pilots to fly an airliner completely manually for the full duration of a transatlantic flight without crashing. Still, over the last decades, autopilots and other assistance systems with ever more sophisticated features have been developed, and I would argue that without this technology crashes would be much more frequent than they are today. Same goes for memory management: you can do it manually, and it might work out most of the time, but if the programming language is helping you with it, the likelihood of memory safety issues decreases drastically. And the problem with avoiding these issues only by "meeting certain standards of rigour" is that you might only find out that you have failed to meet them years later, when you learn that your software has a vulnerability. | | |
| ▲ | hresvelgr 17 hours ago | parent [-] | | > Same goes for memory management: you can do it manually, and it might work out most of the time, but if the programming language is helping you with it, the likelihood of memory safety issues decreases drastically. And the problem with avoiding these issues only by "meeting certain standards of rigour" is that you might only find out that you have failed to meet them years later, when you learn that your software has a vulnerability. Zig does help you. Array slices, explicit nullability of pointers, defer errdefer, explicit allocators, built-in leak detection, bounds checks, overflow detection, the list goes on. If you need to play around on that side of the fence, Zig gives you a lot to make sure you don't mess it up. If we were talking about C I'd give you your flowers, but we're not. The most common issues and vulnerabilities that crop in C from manually managing memory are strongly mitigated by a quarter of that list. |
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| ▲ | chlorion 18 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Just people like the linux kernel, all major browsers, most of our popular webservers, etc and basically all non-trivial software projects written in C. The good news here is that we have more than just anecdotes to support this, we have empirical evidence. |
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| ▲ | quietbritishjim 19 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| That's like saying that they should have used assembler but they just weren't capable of it. It's personal insult dressed up as a nonsensical technical argument. |
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| ▲ | vintermann 20 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| It matters what software you're writing. When it's a JavaScript runtime, it's not as if you can get away with preallocating all the memory you'll need like some games used to do. |
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| ▲ | blurbleblurble 21 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| So it's reducible to a simple matter of inferiority vs superiority? |
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| ▲ | msdz 21 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Is engineering capability the issue, or time pressure/constraint? |
