[COFF] Zig (was Re: more about Brian... [really Rust])

On Fri, Feb 04, 2022 at 06:18:09PM -0500, Dan Cross wrote: [snip] Have you played with Zig? I've only just started, but it does seem to be trying to address a number of the issues with C ub, and safety, while sticking closer to the 'C' space vs where I see Rust targetting the 'C++' space. It doesn't have Rust's ownership / borrow checker stuff, it does seem to have bounds checking on arrays. e.g. the UB for multiply example you give ends up as a run time panic (which I suspect can be caught), or one can use a different (wrapping) multiply operator similar to in Rust. i.e. see the below test program and its output. DF $ cat main.zig const std = @import("std"); pub fn mulOverflow(a: u16, b: u16) u16 { return a * b; } pub fn mulWrap(a: u16, b: u16) u16 { return a *% b; } pub fn main() void { const result1 = mulWrap(65535, 4); std.debug.print("mulWrap is {d}\n", .{result1}); const result2 = mulOverflow(65535, 4); std.debug.print("mulOverflow is {d}\n", .{result2}); } $ ./main mulWrap is 65532 thread 32589 panic: integer overflow /home/derek/Code/zig-play/main.zig:4:14: 0x2347bd in mulOverflow (main) return a * b; ^ /home/derek/Code/zig-play/main.zig:15:32: 0x22cfda in main (main) const result2 = mulOverflow(65535, 4); ^ /usr/local/zig-linux-x86_64-0.9.0/lib/std/start.zig:543:22: 0x225d5c in std.start.callMain (main) root.main(); ^ /usr/local/zig-linux-x86_64-0.9.0/lib/std/start.zig:495:12: 0x20713e in std.start.callMainWithArgs (main) return @call(.{ .modifier = .always_inline }, callMain, .{}); ^ /usr/local/zig-linux-x86_64-0.9.0/lib/std/start.zig:409:17: 0x2061d6 in std.start.posixCallMainAndExit (main) std.os.exit((a)call(.{ .modifier = .always_inline }, callMainWithArgs, .{ argc, argv, envp })); ^ /usr/local/zig-linux-x86_64-0.9.0/lib/std/start.zig:322:5: 0x205fe2 in std.start._start (main) @call(.{ .modifier = .never_inline }, posixCallMainAndExit, .{}); ^ Aborted $ zig build-exe -O ReleaseFast main.zig $ ./main mulWrap is 65532 mulOverflow is 65532 $ zig build-exe -O ReleaseSafe main.zig $ ./main mulWrap is 65532 thread 32608 panic: integer overflow Aborted --