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content/posts/25-10-01-why-we-cant-forget-to-flush.md

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+---
+date: 2025-10-01T22:32:18-06:00
+description: "Why flushing buffers is necessary"
+lastmod: 2026-02-24T00:35:36-07:00
+showTableOfContents: true
+type: "post"
+title: "TIL: Why We Cant Forget to Flush"
+image: ""
+image_credit: ""
+image_alt: ""
+tags: ["zig", "programming", "til"]
+---
+
+# Context
+
+I just learned about this book [Systems Programming with Zig](https://www.manning.com/books/systems-programming-with-zig).
+I'm reading through the free introductory chapters to familiarize myself with things I thought I'd already know. But, as
+a college drop-out, I think there are a handful of low level concepts I missed, and buffer flushing was one of them!
+
+# Reflection
+
+Zig is all about removing implicit behavior. Its number one of the `zig zen` after all:
+
+```shell
+nate in ~/source/zig-systems on main λ zig zen
+
+ * Communicate intent precisely.
+ * Edge cases matter.
+ * Favor reading code over writing code.
+ * Only one obvious way to do things.
+ * Runtime crashes are better than bugs.
+ * Compile errors are better than runtime crashes.
+ * Incremental improvements.
+ * Avoid local maximums.
+ * Reduce the amount one must remember.
+ * Focus on code rather than style.
+ * Resource allocation may fail; resource deallocation must succeed.
+ * Memory is a resource.
+ * Together we serve the users.
+```
+
+When you want to write some text to the console, the program needs to make a syscall to actually send that data to
+the OS, to then print out those characters. By default, most languages flush buffers for you, because when you call
+`writeOut("some text")`, you expect it to write it! But, to save on syscalls, zig will buffer those bytes, and any more
+bytes, until you tell it to `flush()`, which then tells your program to make the syscall so we can see those beautiful
+bytes.