One of the harms Go has done is to make people think its concurrency model is at all special. “Goroutines” are green threads and a “channel” is just a thread-safe queue, which Zig has in its stdlib https://ziglang.org/documentation/master/std/#std.Io.Queue
A channel is not just a thread-safe queue. It's a thread-safe queue that can be used in a select call. Select is the distinguishing feature, not the queuing. I don't know enough Zig to know whether you can write a bit of code that says "either pull from this queue or that queue when they are ready"; if so, then yes they are an adequate replacement, if not, no they are not.
Of course even if that exact queue is not itself selectable, you can still implement a Go channel with select capabilities in Zig. I'm sure one exists somewhere already. Go doesn't get access to any magic CPU opcodes that nobody else does. And languages (or libraries in languages where that is possible) can implement more capable "select" variants than Go ships with that can select on more types of things (although not necessarily for "free", depending on exactly what is involved). But it is more than a queue, which is also why Go channel operations are a bit to the expensive side, they're implementing more functionality than a simple queue.
> I don't know enough Zig to know whether you can write a bit of code that says "either pull from this queue or that queue when they are ready"; if so, then yes they are an adequate replacement, if not, no they are not.
Thanks for giving me a reason to peek into how Zig does things now.
Zig has a generic select function[1] that works with futures. As is common, Blub's language feature is Zig's comptime function. Then the io implementation has a select function[2] that "Blocks until one of the futures from the list has a result ready, such that awaiting it will not block. Returns that index." and the generic select switches on that and returns the result. Details unclear tho.
jerf|3 months ago
Of course even if that exact queue is not itself selectable, you can still implement a Go channel with select capabilities in Zig. I'm sure one exists somewhere already. Go doesn't get access to any magic CPU opcodes that nobody else does. And languages (or libraries in languages where that is possible) can implement more capable "select" variants than Go ships with that can select on more types of things (although not necessarily for "free", depending on exactly what is involved). But it is more than a queue, which is also why Go channel operations are a bit to the expensive side, they're implementing more functionality than a simple queue.
kbd|3 months ago
Thanks for giving me a reason to peek into how Zig does things now.
Zig has a generic select function[1] that works with futures. As is common, Blub's language feature is Zig's comptime function. Then the io implementation has a select function[2] that "Blocks until one of the futures from the list has a result ready, such that awaiting it will not block. Returns that index." and the generic select switches on that and returns the result. Details unclear tho.
[1] https://ziglang.org/documentation/master/std/#std.Io.select
[2] https://ziglang.org/documentation/master/std/#std.Io.VTable
jeffbee|3 months ago
0x696C6961|3 months ago
smw|3 months ago
femiagbabiaka|3 months ago
dlisboa|3 months ago
Everything is "just another thing" if you ignore the advantage of abstraction.
thiht|2 months ago