Zig self hosted compiler is now capable of building itself • Hacker News Board

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

#141

Post by travisgriggs » Sat, Apr 16, 2022, 7:16 PM UTC

throwaway239i3j wrote: post #49

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…

Of the ones you mentioned, Zig is the only one that has explicit memory management. > Is it worth learning Languages are easy to pick up once you understand fundamentals. The borrow checker is intuitive if you have an understanding of stack frames, heap/data segment, references, moved types, shared memory. You then should be asking "Is it worth using?", then evaluate use cases.. pros/cons.. etc. For CLI, Rust is like…

>> Is it worth learning

> Languages are easy to pick up once you understand fundamentals. The borrow checker is intuitive if you have an understanding of stack frames, heap/data segment, references, moved types, shared memory.

I see this sentiment often. In the last 10 years, I have come up a level in raw C, learned Kotlin, Swift, Python, Elixir/Erlang, and a smattering of JavaScript, all coming from a background that included Fortran and Smalltalk.

My problem with the dialogue is what is meant by “learn.” I have architected, implemented, and maintain different components of our products in all these languages currently. I think that demonstrates I have “learned” these languages, at least at this level of “picked up.” But I can’t write Python the way Brett Canon does. Or Elixir the way Jose Valium does. Or any of their peers. And in that regard I still very much feel I have not “learned”.

I spent a couple days playing with Zig a month or so ago. I became familiar with the way it worked. I could spend another month or so in that phase, and then could probably comfortably accomplish things with it. But I don’t think I’d feel like I’d “learned” it.

It reminds me of my experience learning Norwegian. I lived in Norway for 2 years and did my best to speak as much Norwegian as I could. At six months I could definitely get by. At 13 months, as I embraced the northern dialect, I was beginning to surprise Norwegians that I was from the states. I started dreaming in Norwegian at some point after that. But even at 24 months, able to carry on a fluid conversation, I realized I still could “learn” the language better than I currently knew it.

So I guess, it always seems there needs to be more context, from both the asker and the answerer, when this “should I learn X” discussion is had. Learning is not a merit badge.

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

#142

Post by phendrenad2 » Sat, Apr 16, 2022, 7:16 PM UTC

cercatrova wrote: post #123

phendrenad2 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recommend C. Once you get the hang of it, it's as fast as writing Rust code (and you don't have to think about borrow checks).

Yeah, I sure love debugging segfaults. I've used C before and it was cool to learn but I haven't used it since.

Once you've used C enough, you get the skill to avoid writing segfaults, and when a segfault happens, they're a lot easier to debug.

However, since you're just interested in writing a fast command-line app, what about the JVM or .NET? Those have a startup time issue, but once they're running they're very fast, less than an order of magnitude slower than C/Rust/Zig/etc.

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

#143

Post by okareaman » Sat, Apr 16, 2022, 7:20 PM UTC

chrisseaton wrote: post #126

okareaman wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. Tons of compilers emit machine code.

Sure, I didn't say they didn't. Are you refuting what I said and implying that a compiler is not self-hosted if it doesn't compile to machine code?

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

#144

Post by klabb3 » Sat, Apr 16, 2022, 7:23 PM UTC

melony wrote: post #135

lijogdfljk wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny i came to Rust from Go, Python, NodeJS, etc after a combined .. 15 years or so. I've been using Rust full time (work & home) for ~2 years now. Obviously i'm biased, but i quite enjoy it. I find i am more efficient now than before, because it manages to give me the ease of the "easier" languages quite often with a rich set of tooling when i need to go deeper. Personally i feel the concern over the borrow ch…

The problem is that when lifetimes cause you problems, it can force the entire feature development to stop until the problem is fixed. There is no reasonable escape hatch or alternative (clone doesn't always work).

+1. My programming style normally consists of trial-and-error style prototyping for a couple of iterations, and then later refining that into something that's solid and robust. I find Rust's inofficial "prototyping mode" difficult to combine with it's regular "production grade mode" for practical purposes.

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

#145

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Apr 16, 2022, 7:25 PM UTC

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…

[deleted]

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

#146

Post by geodel » Sat, Apr 16, 2022, 7:29 PM UTC

elcritch wrote: post #125

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…

Impressive work getting Zig self-hosting. However: > As for less memory, I think this is simply a clear win for Zig. No other modern languages compete with the tiny memory footprints of Zig software. Is not true at all. There are several other modern languages that compete with Zig for small memory footprints.

Would you tell about those languages or they are left as an exercise to readers?

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

#147

Post by Comevius » Sat, Apr 16, 2022, 7:32 PM UTC

mlindner wrote: post #84

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.

Hot code reloading is nice to have, but incremental compilation is essential. Your compiler has forsaken you if you have to wait 30 minutes for changes to compile.

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

#148

Post by varajelle » Sat, Apr 16, 2022, 7:41 PM UTC

coder543 wrote: post #138

varajelle wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it is. If you have a String on the stack, it's memory is only reclaimed at the end of the scope, while it often could be free'd before. This is especially bad in async code around await point since it means the memory need to be kept alive more than needed.

I disagree. It is substantially and unequivocally better to hold onto memory until the end of scope than to leak memory by default. How can anyone argue that leaking memory is a better default? That’s a ticking time bomb. Maybe someone is so optimistic as to believe they’ll catch every leak before shipping new code? You can easily add a manual “drop” call in Rust at any point if you want to force an allocation to be…

Of course you can call drop() manually, but almost nobody does or even think about it because that's not the way you program in a language with RAII.

Don't get me wrong. I do think that rust and c++ RAII is much more convenient and safe than the C or Zig way.

(I'd even prefer if you could annotate given struct in rust so the compiler could drop them as soon as it's no longer used, but that s not that simple)

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

#149

Post by elcritch » Sat, Apr 16, 2022, 7:48 PM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #129

elcritch wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also Swift and Nim w/ ARC use reference counting, which generally give much better latency and lower memory overhead. Reference counting is part of the reason iOS devices don’t need as much RAM. Nim’s ARC system also doesn’t use atomic or locks which means it’s runtime overhead is very low. I use it successfully on embedded devices for microsecond timed events with no large tail latencies.

Reference counting is a GC algorithm. I wouldn't buy into much Apple marketing regarding its performance though, https://github.com/ixy-languages/ixy-languages It makes sense in the context of tracing GC having been a failure in Objective-C due to its C semantics, while automating Cocoa's retain/release calls was much safer approach. Swift naturally built on top of that due to interoperability with Objective-C framew…

> I wouldn't buy into much Apple marketing regarding its performance though,

I wouldn’t make claims on Swifts overall performance, but just it’s memory usage (really Obj-Cs) and particularly for GUI development. Java’s GCs have always been very memory hungry, usually to the tune of 2x. Same with .Net. Though to be fair Go’s and Erlang’s GCs have much better memory footprints. Erlang’s actor model benefits it there.

Agreed, they’re all better than manual memory management.

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

#150

Post by npn » Sat, Apr 16, 2022, 7:48 PM UTC

sanxiyn wrote: post #137

npn wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Crystal doesn't have built-in support for parallelism They do, but it is hidden inside a compiler flag, if you compile your prject with `Dpreview_mt` then it will come with multi-threaded support. This has been an experimental feature for a few year though, and there is not much improvement since it first got introduced. Personally I don't use crystal for this kind of feature, and it runs stable enough when I use i…

I use PyPy for such cases. Is Crystal better than PyPy?

I think Crystal is better than Python in term of language design. Unlike Ruby and Python that were way older, crystal is relatively new, so they learned from other languages mistake and try to improve it, result in a more cleaner language.

For the cases mentioned, I think crystal is immensely helpful: - Reading/writing files are easy, usually a single method will give you the result you want. - Working with directories are nice, things like `Dir.mkdir_p`, `Dir.each_child`, `File.exists?`... all existed to make your life easier. - Like ruby, you can invoke shell command easily using backticks - There are some useful libraries to for console app, like `colorize` or `option_parser`. Crystal is a battery included language, so the standard library is filled with useful libraries. - Working with lists and hashmaps is a breeze, since the Enumerable and Iterable modules are filled with useful methods, mostly inspired from ruby land. - Concurrent is built in, so you can trivially write performant IO-bounded tasks like web crawlers.

For a project that made by a handful of people, I just can't praise the dev team enough for making a language this practical.