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I 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…
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Thanks for the detailed answer! I have more questions, if you'll indulge me: If I understood it correctly, you think smart pointers and reference counting are bad habits. Why? Especially the smart pointers bit. Why does Zig use less memory than other languages? Is it inherent to Zig, or can it be reproduced in other languages?
I think Zig prefers explicit memory management, because allocations may fail and should be handled explicitly, and because automatic deallocations lead to hard-to-predict lifetimes (excess memory usage, and bugs for resource handles that are destructed at hard to predict moments). These are things that a "systems language" programmer should put in the work to do correctly/near-optimally, and not ask the compiler to j…
Probably a stupid question, but is LLVM a sort of cheat for "self compiling"? Shouldn't you need to compile LLVM as well?
Are there any languages out there that can only be compiled by a compiler written in their own language? Presumably because the original pre-dogfood compiler stopped being maintained years ago. So that if we somehow lost all binaries of the current compiler, that language would effectively be lost?
It's a pretty common state of affairs, actually. Often arises out of the second or third implementation of the compiler being much better than the first attempts, probably coupled with the momentum of people using the language who can contribute to the tooling because it's in the same language.
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Kotlin has seen fantastic adoption in Android projects, because of the way Google pushes it, while stagnating Android Java on purpose. On the JVM world not really. https://www.infoq.com/news/2022/03/jrebel-report-2022/
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?
Probably a stupid question, but is LLVM a sort of cheat for "self compiling"? Shouldn't you need to compile LLVM as well?
It used to be the case that a compiler compiled itself to bare metal machine instructions, but now with so many cpu instruction set targets that's no longer the case. LLVM uses an intermediate language like an assemby language. Another way to look at it is the TypeScript compiler compiles itself which is written in TypeScript but the intermediate language is JavaScript. V8 handles the translation of JavaScript to mac…
i.e how can someone look at a self hosted zig compiler and build it themself from source, never needing to download blobs from the internet?
Otherwise you lose the ability to trust anything you build.
Hello 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.
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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 i…
imo, most code can do just fine with GC. modern GCs can be relatively low overhead even with guaranteed small pauses (10ms). furthermore, most code that can't handle pauses can be written to not allocate any memory (so GC can be temporarily turned off). as such, the only two places where you need manual allocation are for OS development, and hard real time requirements.
But most software are throughput-oriented.
I 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…