zig

Isaac Freund, author of the River Wayland compositor, talks about writing a Wayland compositor in Zig. He covers why he chose Zig over C and Rust and how Zig can wrap a hairy C library.

Andrew Kelley's roadmap talk on upcoming Zig compiler milestones, focused on compilation speed. It was given at a Zig community event in 2022.

Andrew Kelley, creator of Zig, introduces the language at the Recurse Center's Localhost series in 2018. He covers its goals of robustness, optimality and clarity, C interop, cross-compilation and explicit allocators.

Zig creator Andrew Kelley justifies why Zig exists and tours its distinctive features, including C interoperability and comptime, along with what people had built and what 1.0 would bring. It was given at Philly ETE 2019.

Zig creator Andrew Kelley's RedisConf 2020 talk on modeling data flow with asynchronous I/O in Zig. It explains how Zig's async/await avoids function coloring, and Loris Cro demonstrates OkRedis, a zero-allocation Redis client.

Isaac Yonemoto's ElixirConf 2021 talk on Zigler, a library for writing Elixir NIFs in Zig. He looks at its internals and how it bridges the two languages while keeping the NIFs well behaved on the BEAM.

A Zig SHOWTIME talk by Benjamin Feng on what a memory allocator is, followed by an interview. It covers allocation strategies and different allocator types in Zig.

Andrew Kelley's Zig SHOWTIME talk on an experiment to ship static Linux executables that can do graphics and gaming, followed by an interview. It covers the problems of Linux binary stability, dynamic linking and the graphics ABI.

Andrew Kelley, creator of Zig, presents practical data-oriented design techniques for shrinking memory footprint and making programs cache friendly. He ends with a case study of how these ideas sped up the Zig compiler.

Rob Pike shows how the Go text/template lexer is built, using state functions, goroutines and channels. The talk was given at a Google Technology User Group in Sydney in 2011.

Matt Kulukundis explains how Google designed SwissTable, a fast, cache-friendly hash table, step by step from std::unordered_map. The talk covers open addressing, SIMD probing and the tradeoffs of changing a fundamental data structure.

Catherine West's RustConf 2018 closing keynote on building a game in Rust and organizing a large codebase. It builds up an entity component system and generational indices step by step.

Rob Pike's Google I/O 2012 talk shows how goroutines and channels solve tricky concurrency problems with simple Go code. It features a playful goroutine demo with gophers passing messages and a search engine example.

Chandler Carruth argues in a CppCon 2019 talk that C++ has no truly zero-cost abstractions. Using examples like unique_ptr, ABI constraints and compile-time costs, he shows that abstractions cost runtime, compile time or human effort.

Casey Muratori argues against smart pointers and RAII, advocating grouped-element thinking, zero-is-initialization and stubs as better ways to structure memory and handle errors.

Rob Pike's dotGo 2015 talk argues that Go only seems simple, and that its simplicity hides real complexity that is part of the design. He explains the thinking behind Go's restraint in features.

Liz Rice live-codes a minimal container runtime in a few lines of Go at GOTO Amsterdam 2018. She explains namespaces, control groups and what a host knows about its containers.

Bryan Cantrill argues that programming languages and platforms reflect core values, and compares languages through that lens, with Rust as a main example. He draws on his experience with Solaris, DTrace and ZFS.

Scott Meyers' keynote at DConf 2014, drawing on 25 years of C++ experience to offer the D language community a plea about what it should avoid. It centers on the accumulated complexity and pitfalls of C++ as a cautionary tale.

Liz Rice builds a container from scratch in about 100 lines of Go, showing that a container is not a lightweight VM but a set of Linux kernel features and flags.

Steve Klabnik walks through the history of Rust and how its design evolved toward async/await, including the alternatives tried and dropped. He also discusses the difficulty of adding a major feature to a language.

Louis Brandy presents the most common and infamous recurring C++ bugs seen in Facebook's huge codebase, including shared_ptr data races and operator[] pitfalls. He explains the surprising complexity behind seemingly simple code.

Rob Pike's Go talk distinguishing concurrency, the structuring of independent processes, from parallelism, their simultaneous execution. It uses Go channels and goroutines to illustrate.

Without Boats, a Rust language team member, explains the design of Rust's async/await at RustLatam 2019. He covers the history and constraints behind zero-cost, allocation-free async state machines.

Nicholas Ormrod's CppCon 2016 talk on how Facebook optimizes std::string with its open-source replacement fbstring. It covers storage layout tradeoffs, small string optimization and memory allocation behavior.

Chandler Carruth's CppCon 2016 talk tries to defuse the heated debate over undefined behavior in C and C++. He explains from the compiler writer's perspective why UB exists and how it enables optimization.

Aditya Siram introduces ATS, a statically typed ML-like language that compiles to C and offers type-safe pointer arithmetic and a full proof language. The Strange Loop talk shows off C interop, concurrency and verification features with non-trivial examples.

Jack Moffitt presents the architecture of Servo, Mozilla's experimental browser engine written in Rust, focusing on parallelism across cores, GPUs and SIMD and the safety properties gained from Rust.

Charlie Marsh of Astral explains how uv, a Rust Python package manager, got so fast. He covers allocators, concurrency, zero-copy tricks and the challenges of Python packaging.

Rob Pike's 2010 talk at OSCON's Emerging Languages Camp on where Go's concurrency style comes from. It traces the idea from Hoare's CSP through Squeak, Newsqueak and Limbo to Go.

Rob Pike's GopherCon 2016 talk on the design of the Go assembler, explaining why Go uses a common assembly language translated to each architecture.

Stephen Kell's Strange Loop talk argues that C and Unix already contain Smalltalk-like dynamism and introspection that can be exposed. He presents his liballocs research on bridging dynamic and compiled languages.

Raph Levien presents Xi editor at RustConf 2016, a high-performance text editor built in Rust. The talk goes into technical details, building polished GUI apps, and running a community-focused open source project.

Konrad Malawski's Strange Loop 2023 talk shows how the FoundationDB team adopted Swift incrementally in a C++ codebase. It covers Swift's C++ interoperability, which let them move single functions or entire types over one at a time.

Bobby Powers presents Mesh, a drop-in malloc replacement that eliminates memory fragmentation in unmodified C/C++ programs by compacting memory. The talk covers how it works despite C's fixed object addresses, and its benefits for programs like Redis.

Robert Collins explains why rustup installs were painfully slow on Windows and how changes to rustup and Windows cut install time from 3m30s to 14s. The talk covers NTFS, small files and the cost of antivirus hooks on file close.

Rob Pike presents Upspin at Gopherfest 2017, an experimental framework for naming and sharing files and data securely and uniformly across a global namespace. It is a project written in Go rather than about Go.

RustConf 2020 closing keynote by Sian Griffin that dives into Pokemon Blue glitches, notably Missingno and arbitrary-code-execution tricks. It uses them to explain how memory unsafety works and how memory-safe languages like Rust prevent such bugs.

A 2023 LLVM Developers' Meeting keynote by Abdul Dakkak, Chris Lattner and Jeff Niu introducing Mojo, a Python-family systems language built on MLIR and LLVM for heterogeneous computing.

Rik Arends presents Makepad, a Rust UI framework, at RustNL 2023. The talk covers designing modern, GPU-fast UIs with Rust and includes live-coded demos of an IDE and a synthesizer.