Thought I would share an interesting interaction I had with Claude the other day. Here’s the full chat for reference: Claude
I was coming back to my zigx project (an X11 client written in Zig) and wanted to see if I could improve my support for various image formats. I asked Claude a few questions about the X11 protocol and then asked it to critique my existing code that iterates over all the supported formats. I hadn’t mentioned zig but the code I gave it was in zig and it ended it’s review with:
Are you implementing this in Zig? The syntax looks like Zig, which is an interesting choice for low-level X11 protocol handling.
It was funny having the AI do something that felt very human…we were on the topic of X11 but it got distracted because it noticed I might have been using Zig and wanted to know more. I also wasn’t sure if it was trying to say Zig was an “interesting choice” as a way of expressing skepticism of that choice so I had to ask it why it thought so and here was its reply:
Zig is an interesting choice for low-level X11 protocol handling for several reasons:
- Memory control: Zig gives you explicit control over memory allocation and layout without garbage collection, which is ideal for the precise buffer manipulation needed in X11 protocol handling.
- Error handling: Zig’s error handling model forces you to explicitly handle errors, which is crucial when dealing with network protocols where many things can go wrong.
- Compile-time features: Zig’s powerful compile-time evaluation allows you to generate protocol message definitions and parsers efficiently.
- Low-level capabilities with safety: Zig provides low-level control similar to C but with additional safety mechanisms like bounds checking and overflow detection, which helps prevent common bugs in protocol implementation.
- Cross-compilation: Zig’s built-in cross-compilation capabilities make it easier to build X11 clients for different platforms.
- No hidden control flow: Zig doesn’t have exceptions or hidden allocations, making it easier to reason about the exact sequence of operations in protocol handling.
- Small language footprint: The language is relatively simple compared to C++ or Rust, which can make the codebase more maintainable for protocol implementation.
Using Zig for X11 protocol handling puts you in a sweet spot between the raw performance of C and the safety features of more modern languages, without the complexity overhead of languages like Rust. This makes it particularly well-suited for systems programming tasks like implementing network protocols directly.
Wasn’t expecting it to start throwing shade on C++/Rust out of nowhere but there you go. I guess AI is a fan of Zig?
