Top all-time · #548
Loris Cro
Personal blog · kristoff.it · on HN as kristoff_itprogrammingsystems
Loris Cro's personal blog at kristoff.it covers programming and systems. Since 2019, 108 different Hacker News readers have linked it 219 times, most often “What Is Zig's “Colorblind” Async/Await?”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-09-23, and you can follow it by feed.
Rarely recommended · 3 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers mostly link this blog for Zig's colorblind async/await design and related Zig posts. Individual posts are called a better explanation or well explained, and one comment says a post dismisses Rust.
- Recommended for · 3 comments
- Called a better explanation than the story's link, 'explained very well', and offered as tips for using Zig.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Loris Cro's Blog
Most-linked posts?
- What Is Zig's “Colorblind” Async/Await?24 people · 33 mentions · first linked 2020-06-22
- What Is Zig's Comptime?13 people · 16 mentions · first linked 2019-08-05
- Contributor Poker and Zig's AI Ban12 people · 17 mentions · first linked 2026-04-29
- Zig's New Relationship with LLVM10 people · 17 mentions · first linked 2020-09-28
- Zig's New Async I/O10 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2025-07-12
- Who Should Pay for Source Code Availability?8 people · 13 mentions · first linked 2026-08-09
- Maintain It with Zig8 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2021-09-08
- Playing the Open Source Game5 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2021-04-12
- Zig Is Self-Hosted Now, What's Next?5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2022-10-25
- RAII and the Rust/Linux Drama4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2024-10-22
What Hacker News says?
Bun relies on Zig and Zig is an unfinished product that relies on donations to survive. A shout-out to Zig is not only a nice gesture but also a smart one, since it's in Bun's best interest for Zig to survive at least until v1. The general concern about "written in Zig" being annoying is fair. I think it's a different beast when paired with a call to donate but regardless, if RIIZ is what worries you most, then you…
Comment linking /blog/maintain-it-with-zig/
on “Bun: Fast JavaScript runtime, transpiler, and NPM client written in Zig”Submitted The Static Site Paradox as a story · 546 points
HN discussionPurely from better ergonomics[1], not a compile-time guarantee like Rust has. If your tools for concurrency are better, you're less likely to make a mistake. 1. https://kristoff.it/blog/zig-colorblind-async-await/
Comment linking /blog/zig-colorblind-async-await/
on “Bun: Fast JavaScript runtime, transpiler, and NPM client written in Zig”Submitted Why Go and Not Rust? as a story · 471 points
HN discussionif you want to use Zig, here are some tips : https://kristoff.it/blog/advent-of-code-zig/
Comment linking /blog/advent-of-code-zig/
on “Advent of Code 2024”Submitted Zig's New Relationship with LLVM as a story · 446 points
HN discussionSure, but we're not just doing things out of principle. We have a clear plan on how to be sustainable without giving up seats. It's not all sunshine and rainbows, there are some compromises to make, but we know what we want and what we're willing to give up in exchange. I wrote a while ago my thoughts here: https://kristoff.it/blog/the-open-source-game/
Comment linking /blog/the-open-source-game/
on “I refuse to let Amazon define Rust”Submitted Maintain It with Zig as a story · 438 points
HN discussionTheir "VP of Community" wrote this in 2020: https://kristoff.it/blog/addio-redis/ I didn't come across it until 2022. Still, particularly that and other writing from him and others convinced me the Zig community is full of goobers. That's not so bad, I have my tastes in immature humor and can sometimes be a goober too, but the application in that post's clearly-marked over-the-top skit still is just bizarre and does…
Comment linking /blog/the-open-source-game/
on “Migrating the main Zig repository from GitHub to Codeberg”Submitted Zig's New Async I/O as a story · 385 points
HN discussion> One is they make your functions colored; async functions world best with other async functions while normal blocking functions work best with other blocking functions. Not in Zig: https://kristoff.it/blog/zig-colorblind-async-await/
Comment linking /blog/zig-colorblind-async-await/
on “Tokio 1.0 – async runtime for Rust”Submitted Asynchrony is not concurrency as a story · 311 points
HN discussionZig's "colorblind" async is very exciting for this reason: https://kristoff.it/blog/zig-colorblind-async-await/
Comment linking /blog/zig-colorblind-async-await/
on “Tokio 1.0 – async runtime for Rust”Submitted Zig Is Self-Hosted Now, What's Next? as a story · 303 points
HN discussionIs this going to solve the combinatorial explosion of pre-building native dependencies for every possible target? Python should get rid of its training wheels :^) https://kristoff.it/blog/python-training-wheels/
Comment linking /blog/python-training-wheels/
on “PYX: The next step in Python packaging”Submitted The First HTML LSP That Reports Syntax Errors as a story · 225 points
HN discussion> I also wish we could rewrite everything in a modern language, but the reality is that we can’t and that if we could, it would take a LONG time. The ability to start new projects, or extend existing ones, with a modern and more ergonomic language—Zig—and be able to seamlessly work with C is incredible. That's the Maintain it With Zig approach :^) https://kristoff.it/blog/maintain-it-with-zig/
Comment linking /blog/maintain-it-with-zig/
on “Zig self hosted compiler is now capable of building itself”Submitted Playing the Open Source Game as a story · 188 points
HN discussionFor reference: Tracking issue for overall progress on the self-hosted compiler: https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/89 Zig's New Relationship with LLVM: https://kristoff.it/blog/zig-new-relationship-llvm/
Comment linking /blog/zig-new-relationship-llvm/
on “Zig self hosted compiler is now capable of building itself”Submitted Interfacing with Zig, a BDFL-run project as a story · 161 points
HN discussionThe problem is that comptime implies a full compile-time evaluation, while when doing an inline for you only want to unroll over a list of potentially heterogeneous elements but the body of the for loop will remain available for evaluation at runtime, if not all vales are comptime known. In a comptime block that would cause a compile error. I have an example of that in this blog post: https://kristoff.it/blog/what-i…
Comment linking /blog/what-is-zig-comptime/
on “Why I rewrote my Rust keyboard firmware in Zig: consistency, mastery, and fun”Submitted What Is Zig's Comptime? as a story · 116 points
HN discussionI think the GP refers to Zig's approach[1], which is just “do mark functions as sync or async in there signature, just switch between two modes at compile-time using a global flag”, which I don't think fits well into Rust's values of being explicit about what is happening. [1]: https://kristoff.it/blog/zig-colorblind-async-await/
Comment linking /blog/zig-colorblind-async-await/
on “Why asynchronous Rust doesn't work”Submitted RAII and the Rust/Linux Drama as a story · 98 points
HN discussionZig does it ( https://kristoff.it/blog/zig-colorblind-async-await/ ). Basically using "await" just means you are declaring opportunity for concurrency at the call site, but it is still valid to await a synchronous function. And it is valid to call a function synchronously, even if it internally supports concurrency via await.
Comment linking /blog/zig-colorblind-async-await/
on “Why asynchronous Rust doesn't work”Submitted The Python Package Index Should Get Rid of Its Training Wheels as a story · 92 points
HN discussionthe answer I've seen when it has been brought up before is that (for allocators) there is not a practical impact on performance -- allocating takes way more time than the virtual dispatch does, so it ends up being negligible. for code bloat, I'm not sure what you mean exactly; the allocator interface is implemented via a VTable, and the impact on binary size is pretty minimal. you're also not really creating more th…
Comment linking /blog/zig-new-async-io/
on “Why is Zig so cool?”Submitted The good, the bad and the ugly standup as a story · 84 points
HN discussionAre you referring to the Zig compiler switching to become self hosted [1], or the Zig website switching to becoming self hosted [2]? (I assume the latter.) [1] https://kristoff.it/blog/zig-self-hosted-now-what/ [2] https://ziglang.org/news/migrate-to-self-hosting/
Comment linking /blog/zig-self-hosted-now-what/
on “Pledging $300k to the Zig Software Foundation”Submitted Improving your Zig language server experience as a story · 83 points
HN discussion
