ATTACK of the KILLER FEATURES - Martin Wickham - Software You Can Love Vancouver 2023 

yeah I'm really confused I didn't even realize it existed. the examples shown are only a "bug" once you realize that the compiler will turn a T into a *const T. which changes the semantic model you have. If the language allows take parameters as pointers then when you don't take a parameter by a pointer your assumption is that it is a copy. it's sounds like saying " I'm creating this big memory and moving it here and ... ,oops, ... ohh that's wasteful" ... uhhh yeah so if you don't want to do that .. then don't do it...

I agree. It seems antithetical to Zig's ethos of 'no hidden control flow'. I know those are different concepts but this hidden functionality. If it's causing problems, it's the programmers fault.

I tend to agree, yes. One of my favorite things in Zig is the "no hidden" approach, and this goes contrary to that. It's well intentioned but it is also contradictory to my expectations, for sure.

Yes it does seem opposed to how Zig markets and talks about itself to have potentially-damaging optimization in place that the programmer is expected to just already know about separately from explicit language semantics. It's perfectly fine behavior but it should be made obvious to the programmer in some way. I like the suggestion of Go's no PRO but have a compiler or linter warning along the lines of "hey are you sure you want to pass a 2kB object by value? This could impact performance. Maybe pass this by reference instead" instead of doing this behind my back when it has a non-zero chance of blowing up in my face.

On a modern desktop CPU, there are so many registers that passing stuff by value is cheap for things that are even 4-16 cache lines in size. A struct of say a couple of doubles is same cost to pass by value in registers as it is to pass by reference. Except that at the time of use, loading via the reference will eat cycles for nothing. Copies via registers are always cheaper. The only time when references make sense is when the stuff is large enough that loading it to copy would start evicting useful data from the data cache. So we don’t want memcpy, and don’t want to load things that are more than a couple cache lines in size if they are in memory and unlikely to be in the cache, and if the function would only access a small part of the copy in terms of cache lines. But passing by value in vector registers is cheap on platforms that support it if the memory roundtrips can be avoided. So passing large structs around by value will work as long as there’s locality of reference and optimizations are global.

odin is much much fun

@@_slier imagine finding odin content and let happy odin users that zig is much much fun... Why?!

I'm very hopeful that Zig can be the successor to C that it wants to be. Having written more C than I ever planned to, I can say without a doubt that Zig's approach of making what would be UB in C opt in and explicit is easily the most exciting feature of the language for me (tied with comptime :) ). It removes the dread and paranoia that I experience as a product of valid syntax and seemingly safe code producing the strangest bugs that waste my time, and erode my sanity. It makes me feel safe to pull out more stops to optimize my code when necessary instead of trying to always walk the defined behavior tightrope to avoid getting stabbed by the UB demon clinging to my ceiling that's been eyeing me ever since I opened the .c file I'm working in.

@@kanji_nakamoto imagine caring :), seriously though they're both fantastic and there is room for both

I enjoy writing in Zig, but I think Rust is still the go-to lang for me.

Rust BTW LLVM Optimization Remarks ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-qmEsx4MbKoc.html how rust solves the problem.

TOP G

Yes, it goes against everything that Zig promises to be.

Tbh it's not worst than C / Cpp UB, I mean if you just have to remember that detail to be effective in the language to me that's ok, I'd much rather have one thing to remember, than 800 subtleties that you have to know by heart if you don't want to waste hours debugging C/cpp all those weird integer promotion rules, the std behaviour, which one does allocation etc, plus the mental load of macros and templates, and keywords having to be interpreted in context to their location in the code. I still think this is not great and they should definitely fix it but honestly I would take those UB any day of the week.

​@@pierreollivier1 I do feel it's worse than UB because these issues are (apart from the async part where RLS is needed) purely caused by optimizations that are not as safe as they appeared, that also violate the idea of having the language be explicit - if I say a value should be passed by value and rely on that inside the function, this can magically mess me up and I might not notice. A lot of UB has well-defined rules when it applies, and there's already tons of tools to detect and deal with a large class of it, both statically and dynamically, but more importantly: The fixes are often simple. The list append example in the talk? My only idea on fixing this would be an explicit clone to a temporary inside the function, before growing, because I cannot trust the type system that by-value means by-value when it actually matters.

@@pierreollivier1 If you genuinely run into UB this often while using C++ and C, you are doing something very wrong. This feature is bad enough to kill zig entirely, and needs to be removed from the language ASAP.

@@Adowrath I have to disagree, from my intuition I feel like it would be easier to just remember one unpredictable but dramatic UB, rather than 10s of very well documented one, like think about it how many times have you encountered some really nasty bug in C just to realise its the implicit integer promotion rules, or maybe on your machine you have a logical shift instead of an arithmetic one, or maybe the function of the std send back -1 but you forgot that you are assigning it to an unsigned int and you are never catching that -1 (I know this one is very silly) but the truth is that we are all humans and despite knowing about probably all of C UB I still makes those mistakes some times, and remembering and searching where it's coming from is always an annoying experience, I believe they will be able to solve it in the future, but even if for some reasons they can't then In my opinion 1 very annoying UB is better than 40 small UB.

NRVO does not apply to the braced initializers in the type of example where it becomes problematic in Zig. The same example In cpp would be a copy initializer and incur the cost of the copy.

That was literally said in the video

Zig isn't a product, and you didn't pay anything for it. So fine, go get your money back i guess. Its a in development. It has bugs. These are bugs.

It'll get fixed before 1.0 (ETA: at least 5 years™)

Not really. Pointers add semantics on top of values, where as values (ideally) do not add semantics on to pointers. People don't just return things by pointers to be efficient. They often do it so that they can signal some non-local change via the state associated with it. Generally people return things by value because they are only interested in the value, which you have access to whether its a pointer or a value.

I don't know enough about rust to say for certain but it seems like... In a sense the problem is that they didn't create rust. Rust is very explicit copying, moving, aliasing, "borrowing" and of course (infamously) lifetimes.

@@maninalift i had on mind in that joke that they in purusit of optimization reach a place two steps behind borrow checker 😉 People trying to save C++ make similar route many times but chasing safety instead 😉 I keep fingers crossed for Zig wich have guaranteed first row as C replacement for a big start and evolve further. Rust is.... diffrent, totally new world with new laws of "programatics" but at first seems familiar but it is a trap 😅 More i know i more belive in Occaml with low-level access metaphore...

Can you explain, how much and what issues does this create ?

@@shrin210 issues? I thought about fact that c++ syntax is not what prevents optimalisation but nature of some things or set of things that are allowed. But I strongly keep fingers crossed for Zig anyway. It is great language with clear rules and its integration with c/c++ compiler/linker ecosystem additionally with crosscomplilation in mind is incredible almost unbelievable and sure will have place in CS books. But with set goals I clearly see zig as few orders better but compatible replacement in embedded systems, especially in cars or planes (no hidden allocation rule could and can save few lives)

RAII is like defer tied to value lifetime, it's not the same. defer/errdefer don't care about value lifetimes and can be used for other purposes other than destructors.

who said Zig is making groundbreaking stuff ? It is just Simple Language, due to this it can't do background magic like other Programming language does.

No individual feature makes a tool worth using. Its generally about the interplay between features, and agreement with the intent and priorities of the design and execution as a whole. Whatever the feature is, lisp more than likely got there first anyhow. So why doesn't anyone use it?