[neckbeards]

It's a bit of both! I’d love feedback from someone more experienced with Zig, especially if there’s any flaw in my reasoning here.

The programming language is part of the system design. The abstractions, invariants and guarantees the language provides define what classes of bugs are even possible to have. For example, Rust’s ownership and lifetime semantics eliminate entire categories of memory and concurrency errors that would otherwise surface as “system-design” issues in C or Zig.

When you say “power to weight ratio”, could you elaborate on how that applies relative to C++ in the context of TigerBeetle? You mentioned io_uring support being added. What makes Zig uniquely suited for that compared to a more mature language like C++, which already offers a concurrency model and a sophisticated type system you can selectively use?

You also mentioned prefetch support. That's a lot easier to implement in other languages. I’m curious what specifically made Zig the better fit for these optimizations in your experience.

I appreciate you taking the time to respond to my question.

[jorangreef]

Glad to hear!

Let me invert our roles!

What are 3 of some of the hardest correctness problems in TigerBeetle—and how does TigerBeetle solve them?

Hint: None of these would be solved by language.

[neckbeards]

I don't know. I don’t doubt that TigerBeetle’s hardest correctness challenges can’t be solved by language alone. TigerBeetle has impressive guarantees! Those are inherently systems-design problems.

But the language defines the failure surface and the cost of getting those systems problems right. Likewise, the difficulty and performance of implementing correctness mechanisms (lock-free data structures, concurrent logs or safe async I/O) are directly shaped by the language’s semantics and toolchain.

So while I agree end-to-end correctness is a systems-design problem, the language choice determines how much of that correctness is enforceable, how much is manual and how hard it is to make the right design fast and reliable.