This change + the existing packed struct logic will be great for working with bit packed binary headers w/o having to manually twiddle so much about the bit handling along the way.
It's so interesting to read comments like this and contrast them with the "don't read the code" type of vibes out right now. It feels like half of the developer world is optimizing low-level struct packing and the other half is YOLO'ing 300 KLOC Electron apps. Very confusing.
yeah, remember those newfangled fancy Node.js guys who would just copy/paste from Stackoverflow without any understanding?
Or the Java guys who wrote bloated apps that wasted CPU cycles on garbage collection instead of writing in C++, like God intended?
Or the Fortran / Cobol guys who wrote in those God-damned, wasteful, useless high-level languages, instead of using assembly, like a proper programmer should?
i think it's perfect: AI allows you to go incredibly deep (you have unlimited access to context to make incredibly impactful surgical changes), or you can go incredibly broad (you have unlimited access to context to tie a mind numbing amount of components together). what shakes out is the middle layer: "infra" between "algorithms" and "product".
though, to be fair, the middle layer itself is composed of this same work. so it's fractal, or turtles all the way down.
I think it makes sense, if one sees that LLMs exposed various pre-existing splits in the developer world.
Those who viewed code as a means to build something else, are happy to switch to LLMs if they can build that something faster/cheaper.
Whereas, those who liked coding for its own sake, don't want to use LLMs, and fear for their jobs and their happiness.
Unfortunately for the latter group, we're moving to a world where most development is done by LLMs, and only cutting-edge or hobbyist work is done manually. E.g., Japanese artisanal wood-working and joinery is beautiful and elegant... but modern carpentry doesn't build that way.
Zig is already great for this with ‘packed struct’ and arbitrary size ints. Allows for very clean protocol creation between systems with known properties. This is another great step in that direction.
you need different packed structs for little- and big-endian data. and casting with little-endian data is a nightmare - you need to reverse-cascade your struct fields to be in accordance with the little-endian bit-pattern. (or have a comptime function that does it for you, of course. but then you lose all declarations for the struct). what should be a simple writing down of a protocol is now a pedantic and error-prone ordeal.
if someone chooses to do that they own the problems.
> network byte order isn't a thing
if the network serializes/deserializes for you (kernel primitives) then you don't care what it does. if it doesn't and for some reason you choose to use big endian, again, you own the problem.
Network byte order has nothing to do with the kernel and you have to care about it
It’s a standard because neither side of the connection knows the endianness of the other side so there must be a standard. That standard is big endian regardless of your architecture or kernel or anything else
So any serialization intended go over the network should be big endian
You may have never done socket programming, or do you use wrapper libs in Zig? Because you have to send the kernel big endian port numbers for example.
What do you do if you program a kernel in Zig, or just generally do low level networking?
My point is to refute the statement that everyone has agreed to little endian, and so there aren't use cases to want to do conversion. Programs do not exist in a vacuum, most programs do not.
Well you would, of course, have a mapping layer between wire types and domain types, like in any good codebase. You do the endianness conversion at that boundary, and then you can just send it out.
then you either use an existing C library (the most likely approach) or if you are determined to re-implement it you have to be careful parsing their bytes.
Generally those edge cases are always the same endianness. You don't need big and little endianness versions of the structures. What's important is that everyone agrees on the same thing.
