D has a C compiler built-in now, I wonder if we could bootstrap all the toolchain now.
Zig self hosted compiler is now capable of building itself
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Re: Zig self hosted compiler is now capable of building itself
#32I was thinking of learning Rust but it seems a bit overkill due to manual memory management as compared to languages with similar speed like Nim, Zig, and Crystal. How would one compare these languages?
Is it worth learning Rust or Zig and dealing with the borrow checker or manual memory management in general, or are GC languages like Nim or Crystal good enough? I'm not doing any embedded programming by the way, just interested in command line apps and their speed as compared to, say, TypeScript, which is what I usually write command line apps in.
Re: Zig self hosted compiler is now capable of building itself
#33I was thinking of learning Rust but it seems a bit overkill due to manual memory management as compared to languages with similar speed like Nim, Zig, and Crystal. How would one compare these languages? Is it worth learning Rust or Zig and dealing with the borrow checker or manual memory management in general, or are GC languages like Nim or Crystal good enough? I'm not doing any embedded programming by the way, just…
Memory has to be managed by something. The more decisions that are made for you in how that happens the less flexibility there is for certain situations.
Re: Zig self hosted compiler is now capable of building itself
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
As someone not familiar with android development, this is somewhat confusing because I always thought Google was pushing dart/flutter for mobile these days? Or is it both at once?
Dart/Flutter is their React Native competitor. It’s in the same space as Xamarin - A secondary language and UI toolkit who’s selling point is rapid development for multiple platforms. Kotlin is to Java (on Android) as Swift is to Objective-C (on Apple) - the successor primary platform language.
Thanks, that's a solid summary.
Feels like an environment that moves so quickly (to someone like me anyway). Can barely keep up.
Re: Zig self hosted compiler is now capable of building itself
#35I was thinking of learning Rust but it seems a bit overkill due to manual memory management as compared to languages with similar speed like Nim, Zig, and Crystal. How would one compare these languages? Is it worth learning Rust or Zig and dealing with the borrow checker or manual memory management in general, or are GC languages like Nim or Crystal good enough? I'm not doing any embedded programming by the way, just…
Memory has to be managed by something. The more decisions that are made for you in how that happens the less flexibility there is for certain situations.
Sure but my use cases would be stuff I'd normally write in TypeScript or Python that already have garbage collection. Like I said I'm not doing embedded programming so I don't have too much of a need to manage memory.
My question could be further constrained then to be, is learning Rust or Zig despite its manual memory management worth it for applications that are normally already garbage collected in their current implementations? Or are languages like Nim and Crystal enough? Does Rust and Zig have other benefits despite manual memory management?
Re: Zig self hosted compiler is now capable of building itself
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
Congratulations with the milestone! Does using Zig over C++ lead to "less memory, and represents a modest performance"? Or was the C++ implementation a bit sloppy? (lacking data oriented design for instance) Also, what specifically are you most excited using Zig for?
Thanks :) The new Zig implementation is certainly more well designed than the C++ implementation, for several reasons: * It's the second implementation of the language * It did not have to survive as much evolution and language churn * I leveled up as a programmer over the last 7 years * The Zig language safety and debugging features make it possible to do things I would never dream of attempting in C++ for fear of f…
Thanks for all the context. Curious to know more about the concept/design of the DAW.
Re: Zig self hosted compiler is now capable of building itself
#37[deleted]
Re: Zig self hosted compiler is now capable of building itself
#38Take off every 'ZIG'!!
edit: all your base are belong to us
Re: Zig self hosted compiler is now capable of building itself
#39I was thinking of learning Rust but it seems a bit overkill due to manual memory management as compared to languages with similar speed like Nim, Zig, and Crystal. How would one compare these languages? Is it worth learning Rust or Zig and dealing with the borrow checker or manual memory management in general, or are GC languages like Nim or Crystal good enough? I'm not doing any embedded programming by the way, just…
Zig uses manual memory management too (even more manual than Rust), so that's a bit strange question.
Re: Zig self hosted compiler is now capable of building itself
#40Hello HN! Here is some context to decorate this announcement: The Zig self-hosted compiler codebase consists of 197,549 lines of code. There are several different backends, each at varying levels of completion. Here is how many behavior tests are passing: LLVM: 1101/1138 (97%) WASM: 919/1138 (81%) C: 740/1138 (65%) x86_64: 725/1138 (64%) arm: 490/1138 (43%) aarch64: 411/1138 (36%) As you might guess, the one that thi…
Happy to see the C backend coming along. LLVM is a major barrier to use on esoteric embedded devices.