YHK - yet another hacker news clone

“ The language is different from Rust (who could’ve thought that, yeah), but it left a genuinely good impression. It’s straightforward, modern, and blazingly fast. I believe it has real potential to become the true successor to C. On the other hand, it’s still young, and it shows: the shape of the language itself feels unfinished in places, and I suspect it’ll pick up more of the cooler quality-of-life features and syntax sugar as it matures.

As for me, I’d like to keep contributing to the ecosystem, and I will, whenever I come across a project worth building.”

Idk I don’t write either well enough to have a hand in this but losing out all of this for more Imperative stuff seems like a step back.

“ No functional paradigm

Rust is technically an imperative language, but it draws heavily on functional concepts: zero-cost iterators, lazy evaluation, ADTs, pattern matching, monadic types, traits, closures, and so on. Having also spent time with Haskell and Erlang, I’ve become fairly inclined toward the functional style, and it shows in this library. It leans heavily on FP idioms:

Monadic error control via combinators like Queryable and related types Monadic-style data types like Data<T> with map, flat_map, reduce, and friends Pure, immutable transformations Combinators over iterators instead of loops Closures for local abstraction Declarative macros as a small embedded DSL Sum types and product types”

I don’t see the point of letting an LLM generate an article when the topic is your personal, subjective experience which only you, a human, would be able to express.

> The first thing that caught me off guard — and honestly, who would’ve expected this to be the memorable part — was IDE support, or the near-total lack of it.

I would have completely expected that.

I think when we're looking back on the 2020s we'll be struck by the Allocator obsession

All of the Handmade "C successor" languages seem to have this obsession, including not only Zig but Odin, C3 and Jai.

For some toy problems you can do clever allocator tricks and get a huge perf win. For example Jai and Odin both seem to really want you to write code which can throw away a "per-frame" arena periodically so they're not paying to track allocations in the arena because they're all thrown away at the same time.

But a lot of real world software just isn't that simple. This doesn't make such features worthless, it just means they're one of a thousand tools the experienced developer could want in their toolkit, not really deserving headline status.

Off topic, but I remember fondly the pre-LLM days when I used to love reading about programming languages. I never got a chance to professionally work with Rust, but made some cool hobby projects with it. Would have eventually tried out zig too.

Now it all feels so pointless though. Like memorizing rules to do mental arithmetic. Sure, there is still use for language expertise, but not enough to get excited over new concepts and ideas.

Would recommend learning how to use arena allocation. You would have patterns like:

fn run_query(alloc) {

   arena = init_arena(alloc);

   defer arena.deinit();

}