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Analyzed from 503 words in the discussion.

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#zig#interfaces#interface#release#nice#easily#more#right#https#codeberg

Discussion (16 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

mihaelm•about 5 hours ago
Obviously, I/O as an interface is the headliner here, but there are lots of other goodies to pay attention to, such as the "juicy main".

Small integers auto coercing into floats is a nice gift to game devs. It's nice that game dev is acknowledged as one of the niches Zig can target as I believe it could really thrive there due to how easily it can integrate with C & C++. Or, rather, more easily than the alternatives.

xeubie•about 5 hours ago
What a banger of a release. The new `Io` interface was a huge breaking change for my project, but I made the transition. Zig seems to be pulling the same trick it pulled with allocators: just make it an explicit value that you pass around. Explicit allocators felt obviously right in retrospect, and so far this feels obviously right too.
mihaelm•about 5 hours ago
The approach feels like a natural extension of Zig's philosophy about explicitness around low-level operations (no hidden control flow, no hidden memory allocations, etc.). Your function can be blocking? Communicate that through the function signature! Very in style for the language.
sionisrecur•about 5 hours ago
The "Juicy Main" looks like a very nice QoL feature. Gets rid of all the boilerplate for allocators and argv.
portly•about 3 hours ago
Do I get it right that this is everything you need for a typical CLI tool?
nesarkvechnep•about 3 hours ago
You got that right.
portly•about 3 hours ago
That's clean.
mihaelm•about 5 hours ago
It's the dark horse of this release as CLI parsing can also be more easily built on top of it. There's a couple of proposals floating around now, so I hope we get something soon-ish (maybe in 0.18 since a short cyle is planned for 0.17).
fredyr•about 4 hours ago
This sounds interesting to me - could you elaborate a little on what things are in those proposals?
mihaelm•about 3 hours ago
Sure, this is the issue tracking the work: https://codeberg.org/ziglang/zig/issues/30677

The idea is to offer some kind of CLI parsing in the std. It says minimal, but the discussion also veers into some more advanced options.

The discussion resulted in two PRs (that I know of):

- Type-driven: https://codeberg.org/ziglang/zig/issues/30677

@dotcarmen extracted it into a package (https://codeberg.org/dotcarmen/clip) so people could more easily try it out.

- Composition-based: https://codeberg.org/ziglang/zig/pulls/31620

If you're familiar with Rust's clap, it's a bit like derive vs builder API.

You can also see how each approach would look in practice if you inspect the diff for the "tools" directory on the PRs.

nesarkvechnep•about 3 hours ago
Nice! I'm sad to see SegmentedList go. Also, I'm wondering if it's possible to use `recvmsg` and `sendmsg` backed by the new `Io` interface.
slopinthebag•about 3 hours ago
Have they said how many breaking changes requiring a rewrite Zig will be going through before it stabilises?

Also I thought Zig doesn't have interfaces....how does the IO one work?

badtuple•about 2 hours ago
Interfaces can still be expressed using vtables. You just have to write the vtable yourself rather than have the language do it for you.

Also, Zig's tagged unions (enums with payloads in Rust) are really ergonomic and often what you want instead of interfaces. Alot of languages that use interfaces simply don't expose a good way of doing it so everyone reaches for interfaces by default. But if you don't need an actual interface then this way you don't even have to pay the cost of runtime dynamic dispatch.

pjmlp•about 3 hours ago
It has C style interfaces, meaning structs with function pointers.

Which is basically how most device drivers in OSes that happen to be written in C, including UNIX flavours, work.

_bohm•about 5 hours ago
I've been waiting eagerly for this release ever since the new Io interface was announced. Pumped to start working on some new projects with this!

Love this line from the release notes:

> Lo! Lest one learn a lone release lesson, let proclaim: "cancelation" should seriously only be spelt thusly (single "l"). Let not evil, godless liars lead afoul.