Wow, i did not know about the history of whiteouts and PAX and thanks for sharing so much more in your comment! Now I am tempted to go back and do some edits and make the article even bigger… should I refrain? :P

score 1 · canonical

Great to see the Zig project making steady progress. I genuinely love the ethos and the attention to detail that the core team has shown so far.

What keeps impressing me is that the ambition seems to extend well beyond designing a nice language. There is a lot of painstaking work going into making the whole toolchain coherent: compiler, linker, build system, cross-compilation, tooling, and now things like the Build Server Protocol. That feels like a much harder problem than adding individual language features, but potentially a much more impactful one.

I don’t always agree with their strict anti-AI stance, but at the same time, seeing what they manage to accomplish while sticking to those principles makes their efforts all the more commendable.

score 1 · canonical

Indeed and thanks for mentioning it! I think that’s an interesting bit of the history which i am pretty sure inspired the current design of docker layers… I did find out about this during my research and I am pretty sure i mentioned it somewhere in the article, since I kept wondering “why didn’t they just use Tar PAX headers??”

score 1 · canonical

Indeed, I was more interested in the overall design choices for this one. Looks like they went for the simplest yet effective enough combo!

score 1 · canonical

ahah fair enough! I should have probably had a TLDR; at the top and then a disclaimer “keep reading ONLY if you are really really bored!”

score 2 · canonical