Zig 0.8.0 Release Notes
ziglang.org
Zig 0.8.0 Release Notes
1–10 of 82 posts
Re: Zig 0.8.0 Release Notes
#2Also, for those that are interested, we’re going to have a release party tomorrow live on Twitch. Andrew will demo some highlights from the release and answer some questions from the audience.
https://twitter.com/zigshowtime/status/1399634302833471491?s...
Re: Zig 0.8.0 Release Notes
#3This was a rough release cycle for downstream users of LLVM. During testing of the release candidates, we found and reported 7 regressions from LLVM 11. However, despite having reproducible regressions reported as release blockers, the LLVM project tagged release 12.0.0. Not only were there open regressions at this time, but the 12.0.0 tag did not even tag the tip of the release/12.x branch - so there were fixes already committed into the release branch that did not make it into the tag.
I don't follow LLVM development. Is this normal for the project?
Re: Zig 0.8.0 Release Notes
#4This was a rough release cycle for downstream users of LLVM. During testing of the release candidates, we found and reported 7 regressions from LLVM 11. However, despite having reproducible regressions reported as release blockers, the LLVM project tagged release 12.0.0. Not only were there open regressions at this time, but the 12.0.0 tag did not even tag the tip of the release/12.x branch - so there were fixes alre…
Accidents happen, and LLVM is a really large complex project with tons of downstream users (like Zig and Rust) discovering issues not caught by LLVM's test suite / clang.
It's definitely a real problem[0][1][2][3], I would argue LLVM needs a longer release-candidate cycle before a release is cut - to give downstream users more to pick up and report regressions, as well as LLVM contributors to fix them. A higher quality bar would be great.
[0] https://twitter.com/andy_kelley/status/1365186310088974336
[1] https://twitter.com/andy_kelley/status/1303046926430908416
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/gh3thc/llvm_10_has_pe...
[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/n5ne5i/regression_mis...
Re: Zig 0.8.0 Release Notes
#5I've been working with Zig almost 8h/day since Sept. of last year[0], and am super excited about the ideas it is bringing to low-level programming - even to C/C++/Rust. I hope folks outside of the Zig community give it a glance even if just for the ideas it brings around cross-compilation and being a nice out-of-the-box experience.
Some of my favorite highlights from this release:
> With the advent of the Self-Hosted Linker, Zig is now able to generate well-formed and codesigned binaries on arm64 macOS (aka the Apple Silicon). It is also able to cross-compile C, C++, and Zig code to an arm64 and x86_64 macOS. Additionally, arm64 nightly binaries of Zig are automatically generated by our Continuous Integration service, meaning both arm64 and x86_64 macOS are now Tier 1 targets.
From what I know, with existing cross-compilation for C/C++/Rust, code-signed MacOS binaries are not possible. This new Zig linker makes it possible and works for C/C++/Rust as well[1].
> Finally, as a side experiment, Jakub added in Zig Build System integration with Darling (#8760), a translation layer of macOS syscalls to Linux, with the intention of being able to cross test MachO binaries and macOS specific tests directly on Linux simply by passing in an additional flag -Denable-darling to zig build test.
This line of thinking - not only "how do I cross-compile", but "how do I test my cross-compiled code?" is super interesting to me. I hope it is explored further.
Finally, it's just incredibly cool to see how quickly Zig is developing and how financially stable it is[2], supporting handfuls of core team members to work on Zig. I haven't seen any other language community achieve this, let alone without corporate backing. Truly beautiful.
[0] https://devlog.hexops.com/2021/increasing-my-contribution-to...
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/nii64t/zig_makes_rust...
Re: Zig 0.8.0 Release Notes
#6I've been working with Zig almost 8h/day since Sept. of last year[0], and am super excited about the ideas it is bringing to low-level programming - even to C/C++/Rust. I hope folks outside of the Zig community give it a glance even if just for the ideas it brings around cross-compilation and being a nice out-of-the-box experience. Some of my favorite highlights from this release: > With the advent of the Self-Hosted…
Yeah, what's really compelling to me is how much effort zig puts on "plumbing" work as opposed to tacking more and more language features.
It speaks volumes that zig can provide toolchain-level benefits to other low level languages like Rust.
Re: Zig 0.8.0 Release Notes
#7I've been developing a CHIP-8 emulator as a means of learning Zig, it's been very fun! The community seems quite small and tight-knit, and with that, comes a lot of helpful individuals.
Having never worked with a language that is particular about memory, Zig has felt like a nice balance. Dealing with the allocator is clear and being intentional about the bit-width of things like integers helps articulate what is expected, which can be important in an emulation project. The built-in WASM compilation seems like something I will explore with this project too. That part is a nice touch
Re: Zig 0.8.0 Release Notes
#8I've been working with Zig almost 8h/day since Sept. of last year[0], and am super excited about the ideas it is bringing to low-level programming - even to C/C++/Rust. I hope folks outside of the Zig community give it a glance even if just for the ideas it brings around cross-compilation and being a nice out-of-the-box experience. Some of my favorite highlights from this release: > With the advent of the Self-Hosted…
> code-signed MacOS binaries are not possible
As far as I know, this is possible with clang and the new mach-o lld port as well.
While it's possible with clang/lld in C++, it looks like it is much easier with zig.
Re: Zig 0.8.0 Release Notes
#9This was a rough release cycle for downstream users of LLVM. During testing of the release candidates, we found and reported 7 regressions from LLVM 11. However, despite having reproducible regressions reported as release blockers, the LLVM project tagged release 12.0.0. Not only were there open regressions at this time, but the 12.0.0 tag did not even tag the tip of the release/12.x branch - so there were fixes alre…
It's the first release by a new release manager as far as I can tell: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Tom-Stel...
So hopefully just temporary transition pain while the new manager learns the ropes.
Re: Zig 0.8.0 Release Notes
#10The changes to the IR data structures in this release are really neat- whole trees and graphs fit in a small fixed number of flat arrays. This saves on allocations, saves on total memory usage, and makes them trivial to serialize because there are no pointers.
I recently arrived at a similar design for manipulating NFAs as adjacency matrices, as a replacement for more pointer-y adjacency lists, by way of sparse matrix data structures. Rather than Zig's performance angle, I found that it made whole-graph operations much easier to implement and reuse.
I've also seen similar approaches from array languages like APL, for example this project for running this kind of stuff on GPUs: https://github.com/Co-dfns/Co-dfns
And, I've seen it in Rust as a "workaround" for the borrow checker, where that framing tends to make it feel like cheating or settling, which IMO is unfortunate since when people arrive at it for other reasons it seems to have a lot of other benefits!
There are probably more contexts I'm not familiar with- anyone have any good examples from domains they've worked in?