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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

#81

Post by lijogdfljk »

jgillich wrote: post #64
cercatrova wrote: post #32

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…

I've found that Go is not elegant enough for me and Rust is too difficult to write (I started using Rust in 2015 and after years of trying I eventually realized Rust doesn't make sense for most apps), so I'm all in on Crystal. Despite not having much prior Ruby experience, I absolutely love the language.

I second zozbot234's statement about it being far better than it was in those days.

The language team has done a great job rounding rough edges, and this next roadmap is slated for even more polishing. They heavily prioritize dev experience which is why i think people like myself (a GC'd language person historically) use and love Rust so much.

Re: Zig self hosted compiler is now capable of building itself

#82

Post by mlindner »

cercatrova wrote: post #35
mlindner wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

Rust's memory management is "manual" but it feels automatic for most uses.

Re: Zig self hosted compiler is now capable of building itself

#83

Post by randyrand »

drfuchs wrote: post #75
randyrand wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You just need 1 compiler written in assembly, and work your way up from there. C17 -> assembly of your choice, written in assembly Zig -> C17 “transpiler”, written in C17

Why do you trust the assembler you got from somewhere any more than a compiler?

Because hand written assembly is readable!

Re: Zig self hosted compiler is now capable of building itself

#84

Post by mlindner »

Shadonototra wrote: post #19

Best alternative to C, built with solid foundation to ensure fast compile speed, fast iteration, and easy to maintain code

I don't understand why people want fast compile speeds so much. My day job is/was writing C on something that requires 30+ minutes for one compilation run. It feels like people want fast compilation speeds because they need to keep running their software for some reason.

Fast compilation speeds are a nice to have but basically irrelevant for normal developing of software in my experience.

Re: Zig self hosted compiler is now capable of building itself

#85

Post by ledgerdev »

I have been thinking about creating a little higher level language that targets server side web assembly. Zig looks very attractive, but concerned with how to handle things like strings and datetimes.

How suitable is zig for such a task compared to say rust?

Re: Zig self hosted compiler is now capable of building itself

#86

Post by dralley »

Karliss wrote: post #78
AndyKelley wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Can you clarify about the union part? Did you meant that zig allowed you replacing what would be untagged union in C++ with tagged union in zig? Or does the zig compiler has some kind of debug sanitizer mode which automatically turns untagged unions into tagged unions with checks?

In the past they've talked about the speed and memory improvements they've gotten from using MultiArrayList in the compiler, storing tags separately from the unions themselves. If you have a union with a size of 16 bytes and you add a tag to that which is 1 byte, a lot of space is wasted due to padding. If you keep the tags in a separate array, both arrays are individually densely packed. Less memory wasted due to padding == less memory use overall and better utilization of cache.

But in terms of the implementation, this means working with untagged unions, because the tags are maintained externally.

Re: Zig self hosted compiler is now capable of building itself

#87

Post by skrebbel »

fouronnes3 wrote: post #5

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?

TypeScript

Re: Zig self hosted compiler is now capable of building itself

#88

Post by jchw »

AndyKelley wrote: post #21
erwincoumans wrote: post #12

Earlier 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…

> * a Digital Audio Workstation

Woah.

A little bit ago I went to write a little tool that mucked with the FL Studio FLP format. It was easy enough to guess out the bits that I cared about, so I pretty much just did that using a couple quick projects with specific things in them. However, I did check to see if anyone else had mucked around with the FLP format, and couldn’t help but notice your name. Was pretty surprised as a very curious onlooker to the Zig programming language. You certainly seem to get around :)

That’s a little tangential, but I guess I mention it because I was actually wondering if this was ever something you planned on doing given the fact that it was clear you had dabbled with DAW stuff (forgive me for not knowing if you have a more rich connection to music production than just that; I never bothered to check.)

A DAW in Zig sounds like a kick-ass idea. I tried to write a sort-of DAW toy with friends in Rust and it was a lot of fun even if it mostly made me realize how challenging it could be. (And also how bad at math I am. It took me so much effort to feel like I could understand FFTs enough to actually implement them.) It makes me wonder if your Zig DAW would be open source? It would be a fun project to attempt to contribute to, if or when it ever came to fruition.

Exciting stuff. Congrats on the Zig milestone.

Re: Zig self hosted compiler is now capable of building itself

#89

Post by chongli »

randyrand wrote: post #83
drfuchs wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you trust the assembler you got from somewhere any more than a compiler?

Because hand written assembly is readable!

I believe GP used assembler to refer to the program which reads your hand-written assembly and produces a binary. That program was presumably given to you so you need to trust it.

No, the only way to solve this problem is to start with a computer entirely devoid of code and bit-bang your assembler into the machine with switches, the way the first users of the MITS Altair did it.

Re: Zig self hosted compiler is now capable of building itself

#90

Post by pacaro »

ledgerdev wrote: post #85

I have been thinking about creating a little higher level language that targets server side web assembly. Zig looks very attractive, but concerned with how to handle things like strings and datetimes. How suitable is zig for such a task compared to say rust?

I may be misunderstanding you, but it feels like strings and datetimes are library related more than language related.

I know that higher level languages will have primitives that aim to represent strings, but if you need to get into the weeds with Unicode then you'll be leaning on a library regardless

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