Hacker News: cyber1

New comment by cyber1 in "Postgres rewritten in Rust, now passing 100% of the Postgres regression tests"

cyber1 — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 14:21:46 +0000

Valid point, but unsafe in Rust is more dangerous than unsafe in C, bcs of aliasing. For example PG is compiled with -fno-strict-aliasing.

New comment by cyber1 in "My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite"

cyber1 — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 16:11:39 +0000

The concept of lifetimes was invented long before Rust borrow checker was even "scratched on paper." Of course, people who understand what they are they doing have known about these concepts for decades and have built their architectures around them. However, Rust borrow checker is much stricter than that. You have to build your architecture around the fact that you can't have more than one mutable reference at a time, and your data structures have to be represented as directed, acyclic graphs, etc. If you have to break all these rules by using a lot of unsafe because it's too difficult to represent your system within Rust safe subset using only value semantics and borrow-checked references, etc, then why use Rust instead of C++, C, or Zig?

New comment by cyber1 in "My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite"

cyber1 — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 13:16:34 +0000

What I mentioned is only a tiny part of the entire software, which has been successfully written in C, C++, and now in Zig as well, and is used daily by people around the world.

New comment by cyber1 in "My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite"

cyber1 — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 11:48:23 +0000

For 99.99% of cases, you're reading and writing this under an operating system whose kernel is written in a language without send/sync, and inside a browser that also largely written in languages without send/sync, because those systems are fundamentally well designed. So instead of fixing the bugs and rethinking the architecture, the author of Bun decided to transpile almost the entire codebase from Zig to Rust without a deep architectural review. Okay...

New comment by cyber1 in "My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite"

cyber1 — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 11:17:41 +0000

Why?

New comment by cyber1 in "My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite"

cyber1 — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 11:15:36 +0000

If you use Rust the way it was designed to be used, rather than relying on countless "unsafe" blocks, you need to redesign the entire codebase architecture to make it compatible with the borrow checker rules.

New comment by cyber1 in "My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite"

cyber1 — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 11:09:47 +0000

How is Bun codebase connected to Zig codebase?

New comment by cyber1 in "My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite"

cyber1 — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 11:06:22 +0000

To me, this whole effort of rewriting Bun from Zig to Rust looks like a big marketing move. The question is: if Anthropic AI is really that powerful, why not just fix the bugs and give it the more ambitious task of redesigning the existing Bun Zig codebase in a way that eliminates not only the current bugs but also prevents similar ones from happening in the future?

New comment by cyber1 in "Postgres rewritten in Rust, now passing 100% of the Postgres regression tests"

cyber1 — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 10:16:42 +0000

2664 "unsafe {", 1835 "unsafe fn". This is completely unsafe. It doesn't look like a rewrite that understands what's actually going on or how the architecture should be redesigned to take advantage of Rust strengths. Instead, it looks like an AI generated transpilation with extensive use of raw pointers.

New comment by cyber1 in "Why is Zig so cool?"

cyber1 — Sat, 08 Nov 2025 18:42:47 +0000

I also hope that WG14 eventually adopts successful features from Zig, such as comptime, and reduces the use of ugly macros and _Generic.

New comment by cyber1 in "Why is Zig so cool?"

cyber1 — Sat, 08 Nov 2025 08:27:10 +0000

The biggest advantages of Zig for me are that everything is explicit (no hidden features like overloads or implicit conversions) and that its metaprogramming is powerful, easy to use, and easy to understand.

Implementing OpenMP for Zig to enable its use in HPC context

cyber1 — Thu, 02 Oct 2025 13:01:01 +0000

Article URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.09902

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45449075

Points: 7

# Comments: 0

New comment by cyber1 in "In Defense of C++"

cyber1 — Wed, 17 Sep 2025 11:25:34 +0000

Just look at this: https://pvs-studio.com/en/blog/posts/cpp/1129/ - 11 parts about C++ undefined behavior from people who specialize in finding this stuff. And that’s only the tip of the iceberg.

I use C++ daily, and it’s an overcomplicated language. The really good thing about Rust or Zig is that (mostly) everything is explicit, and that’s a big win in my opinion.

In defense of C++, I can only say that lots of interesting projects in the world are written in it.

New comment by cyber1 in "SDS: Simple Dynamic Strings library for C"

cyber1 — Thu, 28 Aug 2025 00:25:41 +0000

No, it does. "The only two features in the language that do not follow the zero-overhead principle are runtime type identification and exceptions, and are why most compilers include a switch to turn them off." - https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/language/Zero-overhead_pri...

Go SIMD dev branch

cyber1 — Thu, 21 Aug 2025 11:19:24 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/golang/go/tree/dev.simd/src/simd

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44971366

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by cyber1 in "Zig's Lovely Syntax"

cyber1 — Mon, 11 Aug 2025 08:45:28 +0000

At first glance, when I looked through the Zig reference, I didn’t like a lot about its syntax (though syntax isn’t the most important thing for me). But when I tried writing in it, I changed my mind - it’s a concise and convenient language with a very low entry barrier. It feels like Go, and with some C experience, you can quickly start writing functional stuff.

New comment by cyber1 in "Carbon Language: An experimental successor to C++"

cyber1 — Thu, 31 Jul 2025 17:15:35 +0000

"func" is fine; "function" is too long. "fn" is also good, but for example, Go was designed with "func," and it's one of the most successful, readable languages in the world, so why not?

New comment by cyber1 in "Generic Containers in C: Vec"

cyber1 — Sat, 26 Jul 2025 15:46:18 +0000

This is true. I agree with this statement. It's the holy cow of C. However, the problem with generic programming and metaprogramming isn't going away, and many people continue to struggle with it. Introducing something like compile-time reflection might be a solution...

New comment by cyber1 in "Generic Containers in C: Vec"

cyber1 — Sat, 26 Jul 2025 10:44:33 +0000

I'm currently at a crossroads: C++ or Zig. One is very popular with a large community, amazing projects, but has lots of ugly design decisions and myriad rules you must know (this is a big pain, it seems like even Stroustrup can't handle all of them). The other is very close to what I want from C, but it's not stable and not popular.

New comment by cyber1 in "Generic Containers in C: Vec"

cyber1 — Sat, 26 Jul 2025 10:34:21 +0000

Hey, I understand you and know this stuff well, having worked with it for many years as a C dev. To be honest, this isn't how things should generally be done. Macros were invented for very simple problems. Yes, we can abuse them as much as possible (for example, in C++, we discovered SFINAE, which is an ugly, unreadable technique that wasn't part of the programming language designer's intent but rather like a joke that people started abusing), but is it worth it?