Hacker News

111 points by ErenayDev 2 hours ago | 49 comments

audunw 15 minutes ago

Would recommend checking out the Zig state of the (tagged) union as well.

https://youtu.be/zwi5b5xSsKA?is=PTjJJjSnVMdRuZag

It may surprise some people here to see that Andrew is warming up to using LLMs to discover bugs (inspired by results from SQLlite) and considers it a tool on the path to getting to bug free software.

saghm 7 minutes ago

> It may surprise some people here to see that Andrew is warming up to using LLMs to discover bugs (inspired by results from SQLlite) and considers it a tool on the path to getting to bug free software.

Someone in the thread below says their bug was closed because of mentioning that they use AI to confirm the bug they had encountered. Is he going to go back and reopen all of those now that he learned what pretty much everyone else already knew?

mjburgess 4 minutes ago

There's a difference between Opus 4.5 and Astra 6

jabedude 60 minutes ago

How is Zig doing as a project? I remember they took a hard line against AI

agentultra 41 minutes ago

They seem to be doing fine. Tigerbeetle and Ghostty are two projects that continue to do well and are written in Zig. The foundation’s funding also seems to be doing well. They are continuing to make releases.

abc42 54 minutes ago

It looks like they're spending 5 months what should be a 1 month job these days.

onlyrealcuzzo 52 minutes ago

Filed a compiler bug related to dwarf tables that screws up debugging and line of code coverage that they completely ignored, just because I mentioned that I had every LLM check it to confirm it's a bug, since all I know is what kcov and every coverage tool generates incorrect coverage data for my repo, for 100% certain.

bendmorris 41 minutes ago

Sounds like you violated the clearly stated project rules and admitted to it. Are you surprised that they're not engaging with you?

saghm 5 minutes ago

Pointing out something that is not good doesn't require surprise at the fact that it happened

unclad5968 36 minutes ago

It's a violation of project rules to confirm bugs with AI?

bendmorris 33 minutes ago

Read it yourself: https://ziglang.org/code-of-conduct/

sigmar 12 minutes ago

>If you use a chatbot to give you advice on a comment on the issue tracker, that comment is unwelcome.

>No LLMs for finding bugs.

>No talking about use of chatbot/LLM services.

I've said it before and I'll say it again- it's a cult that bans dissent

alexrp 4 minutes ago

For the record, there isn't even uniformity of thought on LLMs within the core team, let alone the broader Zig community.

jibalt 24 minutes ago

Yes ... pretty damn stupid.

phoghed 8 minutes ago

Yeah, the maintainers of a DOA hobby project should certainly be allowed to run it however they want imo

IshKebab 36 minutes ago

Wow I thought surely they wouldn't object to using AI to confirm bugs, but they really do.

Tbf I guess as a popular open source project not using AI to fix bugs, they probably already have more open bugs than they can ever fix so it doesn't really help them for people to find more.

I would imagine his bug was actually ignored just because Zig has 2700 open bugs, rather than some AI policy violation.

bendmorris 31 minutes ago

Claude Code has 13.4k open bugs: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues

Show me a popular open source project that doesn't have a large number of open issues and I'll show you one that has a triage bot auto-close them.

esafak 25 minutes ago

Some have both, despite using an auto-close bot! OC is at 4.6K open and 24K closed issues. https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode/issues

audunw 18 minutes ago

They don’t, at least not any more. Andrew Kelley has explicitly stated that he sees the value of using LLMs to uncover bugs. Inspired by sqllite project.

https://youtu.be/zwi5b5xSsKA?is=PTjJJjSnVMdRuZag

They may just be taking the slow route of rejecting by default until they can be sure that the usage of LLMs provides long term value. I don’t see anything wrong with that. If you’re writing robust software, using LLMs at this stage is a bit of a gamble. We don’t fully know the long term effects on code quality yet.

saghm 4 minutes ago

Ah, so yet another language in the long line of "I'm smart enough to use this but you the user are not"

acedTrex 26 minutes ago

The popular LLM projects have infinitely many more bugs than the zig project does this is a ridiculous message.

UncleOxidant 29 minutes ago

If they really insist on no LLM involvement at all then they're going to fall behind and lose out. Your LLM use case seems really very conservative - you didn't write any code with it, you just use it to confirm the bug. There are many OSS projects that are also taking a similar hardline against LLMs - people are going to fork them and then move on. I've had LLMs fix bugs/add features to a couple of projects like this and, well, they're missing out on the fixes/added features that I'm using locally.

acedTrex 25 minutes ago

They are doing fine, all this "left behind" talk has no basis other than cope.

acedTrex 35 minutes ago

> breaks the project rules

> gets ignored

Who could have forseen this.

greggoB 50 minutes ago

Can you offer any specifics? The ToC looks quite extensive, which to me indicates a lot of design decisions needed to be made (probably involving many people) and unclear how that process might be accelerated by AI.

Unless you're suggesting the language design should also be vibed together?

nvme0n1p1 43 minutes ago

> Unless you're suggesting the language design should also be vibed together?

Sounds like a fun little project, have a bunch of AI pushers fork Zig and see if they can do a better job. I want to see results, not snarky HN comments. After all this progress, ChatGPT should be able to one-shot a better language since AI is so good now... right?

agentultra 38 minutes ago

Claude can’t one-shot a C compiler.

None of these systems can. They need enormous training. They need alignment and reinforcement. They need harnesses. And most importantly they need a human that knows how to write and develop a C compiler.

The ISO specifications are not sufficient. Neither are the System V guidelines. Not even spec tests and compcert.

spankalee 39 minutes ago

One-shot, no, but there are a bunch of people pretty much solo-building their personal ideal language with AI and it's going quite well. You need to know just enough about language design to be dangerous, but you don't need to be a seasoned pro.

I'm doing it myself: https://zena-lang.dev/

Karrot_Kream 27 minutes ago

Been thinking about doing this myself (did some PL in grad school but it's been a long time), but I find myself wanting to reach for a Scheme (using macros to grow the language I want) and customize it or build something atop Janet.

Curious why you wanted a more ML / Rust / Scala inspired syntax. (Personal preference here is totally valid btw, just curious.)

UncleOxidant 25 minutes ago

You're not going to one-shot it, but over the course of a couple of months of evenings you could come up with something usable/interesting if you manage the LLM well.

IshKebab 31 minutes ago

Nobody is one-shotting big projects. Even humans can't do that.

dingdingdang 35 minutes ago

Yep, it's true, but the reality of what it would take to actually fork and commence with healthy use of AI alongside with the elusive soft/hard stance needed to lead technically and socially is probably a bigger challenge than anyone is willing to take on! Soo.. slow and (rather?) well it goes for Zig.

mg74 46 minutes ago

Slow and steady wins the race

saghm 3 minutes ago

And apparently ignores legitimate compiler bugs on the way that someone happened to ask an LLM to double check their diagnosis

jibalt 21 minutes ago

Parables aren't reality.

re-thc 41 minutes ago

Anthropic levels of slowness (pacing)?

mathisfun123 44 minutes ago

in tech? really?

Zak 32 minutes ago

In programming languages, usually. Building software on top of a rapidly-changing language is not often a recipe for success.

nvme0n1p1 41 minutes ago

Yes, the Lindy effect applies in tech too.

acedTrex 34 minutes ago

Im really enjoying using it, works great tbh

DASD 43 minutes ago

Seems to be C++ing which is disappointing. Looking more at C3 and Odin for cases where I'd hoped Zig to land.

deagle50 33 minutes ago

Odin scratches this “stick shift” itch for me better than anything else. Highly recommended.

zer0-c00l 27 minutes ago

can you elaborate on what you mean by "C++ing"?

sureglymop 25 minutes ago

C3 is honestly so good and a bit underrated.

silisili 12 minutes ago

It's my favorite of the new round of languages by far. I just wish it had a bigger ecosystem.

luiwammus 19 minutes ago

Although I understand that upgrading LLVM version is a lot of work, it's a bit frustating that loop vectorization is still disabled.

alexrp 17 minutes ago

The fix could not be backported to LLVM 22 because it changed the LLVM library ABI. We also could not skip straight to LLVM 23 because that would make life harder for distro package maintainers.

ErenayDev 2 hours ago

https://ziglang.org/news/0.17.0-released/

ai_critic 14 minutes ago

> Please consider a recurring donation so that we can offer more billable hours to our core team members.

Just don't be surprised if the project BFDL talks shit about you or your company later.

(Still a good language though, credit where credit is due.)