Diego Pacheco Tech blog

Zig is a general-purpose language created in 2016 by Andrew Kelly .  Zig aims to fix the issues C language has while being pragmatic and simple at the same time. Zig really shines as being simple by not having any hidden control flows, not having hidden memory allocations, no pre-processors, and no macros. Basically, it's one language and one language only. Since pre-processors and macros can get really complex and become their own universe. Sure it's not the Zig Philosophy.  Zig Compiler(Zig cc) also is a C compiler, and the interoperability from C to Zig is very good. Clearly, we can see influence from other languages like Go and Rust; however, Zig is pretty unique and different from Go and Rust.  Zig is fast. Zig is perfect for system programming. I bet we will see a lot of solutions being built in Zig. As a languages aficionado, I like to learn at least one language per year and sometimes more; Zig was my 2021 pick, did not regret it. Even if you dont use all language...

Rust does not stop for one second to amaze me. It looks like Rust was designed to talk to every other language so easily. No kidding, it's clear way Web Assembly and rust have lots in common. Java is never an easy lang to interop with. Today I will show how easily we can interop Java & Rust. In order to do so, we will need to use the Java and Rust compilers. For Java, we will not require any other lib than the standard JDK. For Rust, we will need to create a lib project in cargo and we will need to use the crate JNI. I love this feature because java does not allow low-level code on the main language. So if we need to do something low level, efficiently Rust is my first choice, not only for safety reasons but because is really fast.  Let's get started.

When I start on IT, several years ago(+15), C was the first language that I learned. But was not the first language I mastered and deployed in production which was...surprisingly Visual Basic 6.0. However, when I learned C or any language back on that old and arcane time noddy was into testing. However now is impossible to work professionally in any language without tests. C is a low-level language but still kicks ass and has several interesting libs/frameworks. People use to fear C a lot because of lack of syntactical sugar but once you get used to it is not that hard at all. Today I want to show how you can do Unit Testing with C. I will not show how to do Unit Testing with C++ but with C ANSI actually. We will be using Check a unit test lib for C ANSI.

C language is old(since 1972 to be precise) but still kicks ass. Some folks consider C too low level. IMHO is not that low level, actually, there are some abstractions and syntactical sugars I miss in C but IMHO is something you can leave without since you are befiniting from better performance. Many developers care too much about syntax today and not many care about performance. It really depends on what you are doing and what kind of company you are. There are languages that are more productive than C for sure, however, once you get how to do things properly is not bad at all actually is quite good.  Most of the big languages like Java, C#, python, ruby are actually based on C. C often is a language the most of people fear it. Maybe because we got used to much with languages that do a lot of things for us. IMHO is not that hard, it's just a matter of taste, after some time I learn to enjoy working with C professionally and today I like it a lot. But this really depends...

Lately, I'm working with custom redis-modules and I need to say: redis-modules kick ass. I started working with Cthulu and coding modules with javascript which was nice and very productive but given some of my current use cases I had to go to C. I recommend you take a look at my previous posts here:   -  Building Redis-Modules with JavaScript using Cthulhu   -  Dispatching Custom Commands with Lettuce and Redis-Modules Today I want to you how to do proper debug with Redis modules written in C language. I will be using eclipse Oxygen CPP in order to debug redis module and redis 4. Here there is a video which I recorded with a simple live demo about how to debug a redis-module project and redis. The source code is available on my GitHub . I hope this is useful for you.

Redis is a great K/V store written in C. Redis can accomplish a lot for a single thread process. There are many applications for redis like for instance:  - Frontend Database - Real-time Counters - Ad Serving - Message Queue - Geo and TimeSeries DB - Session State - Cache That's all great but let's say I want more, how can we customize redis? There are some options like a Lua Script , Fork Redis, Tak to @Antirez or Create your own NoSQL database based on redis or not. Redis provided another solution - Redis added support for external modules in 2016.