Inside Zig's New Writer

[n0s4]

0.15 releasing thoroughly sidetracked me into writing a very long blog post about the new std.Io.Writer.

Joe Mckay - Inside Zig's New Writer

Particularly proud of this diagram:

[whitehexagon]

I’ll have a read later, since I still cant my head around writergate.
But an off-topic question, but since you mention it, which tool do you use for your diagrams please? They are nice I am new to linux and tried about 5 last week, all a bit disapointing. I saw @Sze had a nice diagram the other day as well:

Function Call Devirtualization

But this isn’t how Io.Reader/Io.Writer work, instead there we have a pointer to a concrete Reader/Writer instance and a few fields which are used in the hot path and once their buffer is full they use their constant pointer to a constant vtable to deal with that full buffer and after that they again work on concrete direct data. Devirtualization is much less of a concern because most of the operations aren’t virtual to begin with. Here is an attempt at visualizing what is going on with *Io.Wri…

[n0s4]

I use excalidraw.com . It’s a webapp but it saves your work locally I think. It’s quite nice.

[andy_mango]

Thanks for the write up. It is particularly timely since I’m in the middle of implementing a std.Io reader and writer for a Uart peripheral on a bespoke micro-controller platform. I’m still sorting through the interfaces and your explanation helped in a couple of areas where I was still stumbling about.

[plaukiu]

halfway through it and loving it.

may i comment on how a dark theme is not universally comfortable? i’m on a bright train right now and it’s somewhat difficult to read.

[andrewrk]

This is why I love the “prefers color scheme” css media query. It’s brilliant - you can give users what they want without asking them!

[n0s4]

Thanks for the kind words.

@plaukiu

may i comment on how a dark theme is not universally comfortable?

Understood. I’ll try using @andrewrk’s suggestion to provide a light mode.

[kristoff]

well, whether that’s brilliant or gloomy depends on your prefers-prefers-color-scheme setting

[n0s4]

prefers-prefers-color-scheme-color-scheme, perhaps?

[nm-remarkable]

Since this conversation has diverged into css let me add another ask for the blog to be mobile friendly.

[xcaeser]

great read!