It may feel like you’re designing a bridge, but in reality you’re just asking a worker to do that too, and rubber stamping it when the drawings look reasonable.
One day you’ll be asked why it collapsed and realize you don’t actually understand it anymore.
Low-level doesn’t mean more information, it means more explicit.
In Zig, that means being able to use the language itself to express type level computations. Instead of Rust’s an angle brackets and trait constraints and derive syntax. Or C++ templates.
Sure, it won’t beat a language with sugar for the exact thing you’re doing, but the whole point is that you’re a layer below the sugar and can do more.
Option<T> is trivial. But Tuple<N>? Parameterizing a struct by layout, AoS vs SoA? Compile time state machines? Parser generators? Serialization? These are likely where Zig would shine compared to the others.
I don't think there is a standardized meaning of 'low-level'. I think a useful definition is that a low-level language controls more/is explicit about more properties of execution.
So zig/c/c++/rust all have ways to specify when and where should allocations happen, as well as memory layout of objects.
Expressivity is a completely different axis on which these low-level languages separate. C has ultra-low expressivity, you can barely create any meaningful abstraction there. Zig is much better at the price of remarkably small amount of extra language complexity. And c++ and rust have a huge amount of extra language complexity for the high expressivity they provide (given that they have to be expressive even on the low-level details makes e.g. rust more complex as a language than a similar, GC-d language would be, but this is a necessity).
As for this particular case, I don't really see a level difference here, both languages can express the same memory layout here.
> Option<T> is trivial. But Tuple<N>? Parameterizing a struct by layout, AoS vs SoA? Compile time state machines? Parser generators? Serialization? These are likely where Zig would shine compared to the others.
I don't see how any of that becomes easier in the Zig case. It's just extra syntactic ceremony. The Rust version conveys the exact same information.
It’s precisely not syntactic ceremony. It’s normal Zig running at compile time in which you can program types as values. In Rust (and most other languages) all you get is a highly abstract DSL:
Foo<T> where for<‘a> T: Bar<‘a, baz(): Send>
Information dense, but every new feature needs language design work. Zig lets you express arbitrary logic, loops, conditionals, etc. It’s lower level of abstraction than a type constraints DSL.
For example, adding “the method in this trait is Send” to Rust’s DSL took a whole RFC and new syntax. The Zig equivalent could be implemented with an if statement on a type at comptime.
Or how about the transformation of an async function into a state machine. Years of work, deep compiler integration, no way to write such transforms yourself. Same with generators, which still aren’t stable. I’d really like to be able to write these things like any other program.
If you don’t want or need to express things at this lower level of abstraction, fair, same reason most people stick to scripting languages and don’t think about memory layout. But “extra ceremony” is really underselling it.
But there's literally none of that in the example we're talking about. It's just an inert datatype declaration. And if anything the Zig version is more abstract - for the Rust version I have to understand <T>, whereas for the Zig version I have to understand comptime, Self, and @.
You're missing the point. They're just lamenting the contrast between what their friends say (fuck tech, no kings) and what they spend their workweek in service of.
It's not complicated: if these friends would take a non-society-destroying job at equal pay (who wouldn't?) then their values aren't driving the decision, money is. Fine, that's a choice adults get to make. But then own it and actually justify it on its merits, don't just retreat to "who are you to judge."
Didn’t say that. The friends in question clearly think it is. My point more generally was about people who publicly talk about $X being society-destroying while materially enabling $X for a paycheck.
It’s really not clear to me that they think that. OP was clearly saying that if you’re progressive, the intellectually honest position is to be anti-AI. I don’t think that necessarily follows.
All the superficial filler leaves a linkedin flavored taste in my mouth. I’d prefer to hear the author’s own voice and thoughts without noise injected to give the illusion of polish.
I thought it was actually quite funny, but I read it as a sarcastic parody of that writing style. I mean there’s no way:
> This is the founder story: what I built, why I chose it, and what a month of hardware taught me. The engineering writeup will come later, once I've talked to someone who actually understands IP strategy.
Oh this is very real. As someone who lives in Ottawa, Shopify employees are a unique brand of people who think they are tuned into the SV trends but are just huffing their own farts. They're all acting out a small-scale replica of taking peptides and trying to found Uber for Polycules but in a sleepy capital city full of government employees.
Wild how many people take “care about your craft” as a condescending personal insult. Maybe it’s hard to hear once the job’s beaten it out of you. And it’s about to get a lot worse.
The professor is obviously not advising naive absolutism. He’s saying care deeply about your craft, and good judgement will follow from that.
Actually caring is what gives someone the itch to go back and improve things, versus happily calling it a day once minimum acceptable value has been delivered. The rampant enshittification of basically everything should make it clear which disposition is in short supply.
> Have the courage to go slowly, especially when everyone else is telling you that you need to go fast and cut corners.
The advice is aimed at students who haven’t yet decided which type they want to be. In fact it’s directly telling them to think for themselves and not blindly listen to you or anyone else here making the same case.
One day you’ll be asked why it collapsed and realize you don’t actually understand it anymore.
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