Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Zig self hosted compiler is now capable of building itself

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 285 posts

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

#181

Post by bobajeff »

lijogdfljk wrote: post #79
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…

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…

That sounds like good advice. I'll keep that in mind next time I attempt to use Rust on something.

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

#182

Post by Spex_guy »

abbeyj wrote: post #80
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…

If the union is untagged, how can it be determined (at runtime) that you've accessed the wrong field?

The compiler adds a tag in debug modes, but not in release modes.

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

#183

Post by zigger69 »

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…

Crystal: compilation speed is just too slow, sadly. Nim and Zig: I'd definitely just go with Zig. It's an extremely simple language, has no macros (but something much better than macros), is explicit, and in the long run it's just going to be worth it much more than Nim.

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

#184

Post by Spex_guy »

einpoklum wrote: post #176
AndyKelley wrote: post #4

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…

* What kind of tests are these "behavior test"? * Is that a list of compilation targets? * If not all behavior tests pass, does that not mean that the compiler fails to compile programs correctly? Please indulge those of us who are not familiar with self-hosting compiler engineering.

> What kind of tests are these "behavior test"?

Snippets of zig code that use language features and then make sure those features did the right thing. You can find them here: https://github.com/ziglang/zig/tree/master/test/behavior

> Is that a list of compilation targets?

Mostly. Pedantically, it's a list of code generation backends, each of which may have multiple compilation targets. So for example the LLVM backend can target many architectures. The ones that are architecture specific are currently debug-only and cannot do optimization.

> If not all behavior tests pass, does that not mean that the compiler fails to compile programs correctly?

Some tests are not passing because they cause an incorrect compile error, others compile but have incorrect behavior (miscompilation). Don't use Zig in production yet ;)

(edit: fix formatting)

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

#185

Post by mindwok »

I’ve spent the last few weeks building an 8080 emulator in Zig to learn both emulator programming and the language. Gotta say, it’s been a pretty pleasant experience. My only issue was with dynamic dispatch, which lead me down quite a rabbit hole which I didn’t ever fully come out of. Seems that the current situation is build your own using compiler functions and pointer casts.

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

#186

Post by politician »

maleldil wrote: post #164
Comevius wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point of C and Zig is that you can solve any kind of problems with them. In particular there is much more to memory reclamation than garbage collectors or Rust's borrow checker. Some of the reclamation schemes offer wait-freedom, or efficiently support linearizable operations.

What can C and Zig do that Rust can't?

This is kind of a trick question because they are all Turing Complete, but so is Assembly. The best way to interpret your question, then, is not “what is possible” but rather “what is simple to express correctly” and “what is simple to get correct eventually”. Those are questions about how tricky it is to get something to compile in the language and which tools exist to help determine whether a compiled program does what’s expected and does not do what’s not expected.

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

#187

Post by zigger69 »

sanxiyn wrote: post #39
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…

Zig uses manual memory management too (even more manual than Rust), so that's a bit strange question.

It's really easy in Zig to be honest. Just put `defer thing.deinit()` in the right scope and you're done. You gain explicitness and know exactly what's going on in your Code. Everything is obvious. That's the reason Zig is so incredible simple and easy to read. Zig also has a GPA that will tell you about memory leaks or anything.

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

#188

Post by carstenhag »

holoduke wrote: post #24
pjmlp wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

Are they pushing? Most documentation for Android dev is still Java. Or by default Java. It's only the Intelij guys pushing for Kotlin by creating a lockin in their IDE. One reason I refuse to use it.

As an Android Dev: noone of us wants to do java projects anymore. If we had support for some recent versions maybe, but as it is, there's no going back.

0 of our recent or current projects still use java.

Google is either moving/extending libs to natively integrate with kotlin (numerous -ktx libs) or they are kotlin-only (Compose) anyway.

I don't really see the Jetbrains lock-in thing, because: Android Studio is free, you can use any other IDE with syntax highlighting and the terminal to run tests & to compile.

If you want to blame someone for locking in android devs into Android Studio, it would be Google, because they build the previews into Android Studio afaik. But you would have the same criticism at Apple/XCode. Supporting one IDE is already tough I guess.

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

#189

Post by pyjarrett »

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…

Ada is another option without a GC. I wrote a search tool for large codebases with it (https://github.com/pyjarrett/septum), and the easy and built-in tasking and pinning to CPUs allows you to easily go wide if the problem you're solving supports it.

There's very little allocation since it supports returning VLAs (like strings) from functions via a secondary stack. Its Alire tool does the toolchain install and provides package management, so trying the language out is super easy. I've done a few bindings to things in C with it, which is ridiculously easy.

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

#190

Post by guidoism »

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…

I’ve recently been writing personal code that leaks like a sieve. It’s just not worth my time to find every leak when the lifetime of the process is finite and short and it will only ever run on a machine with gigs of memory. I haven’t thought through your question enough but maybe a situation where memory usage would be super high if waiting until the end of scope? I’m probably trying to hard to come up with a situation but I have a gut feeling that freeing mid scope is important under certain circumstances to keep the code simple and understandable.
Post reply on HN