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