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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

#231

Post by capableweb »

Georgelemental wrote: post #194
capableweb wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The perspective of someone who is learning Rust (but not professionally) during the last few months. : - The borrow checker is one of the easier parts of Rust to grok, it's just as you say, not that complicated in the end. - Traits are more annoying to understand and find in source code when they can get added from anywhere, and suddenly you code gets extra functionality, or it's missing the right one unless you impo…

`rust-analyzer` lets you find the trait/impl that provides a method, if you don't have it in your IDE you should get it.

True, that does help when you want to dig into things. I think my main pain-point here is that without extra tooling, the reference is not surfaced. Compare this to Clojure, where every reference is explicit, things normally don't get "magically" created in your scope. Just by searching for a var in the current file upwards (up to the `ns` declaration), you can find out where code is coming from, which is not always possible in Rust.

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

#232

Post by planetis »

fyzix wrote: post #167
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…

Nim strikes a great balance. No need for a low level language for cli and general software. I liked crystal but the lack of support on windows and lackluster dev experience made me stick to Nim. Nim also can double as a web language by transpiling to JS.

I like Nim.

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

#233

Post by zozbot234 »

bscphil wrote: post #222
zozbot234 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Modern Rust is much more straightforward than it was in 2015. It's effectively two different languages, albeit maintaining backward compatibility (i.e. code written for Rust 1.0 should still compile today, with proper edition settings).

Suppose I wanted to try learning Rust again; is there a resource for someone with a lot of (hobbyist) programming experience, and experience with low level languages and memory management (e.g. C), but not complicated low-level languages, like C++? When I tried to work with Rust a few years ago I found it utterly impenetrable. I just had no idea what the borrow checker was doing, did not understand what the error mes…

> Suppose I wanted to try learning Rust again; is there a resource for someone with a lot of (hobbyist) programming experience, and experience with low level languages and memory management (e.g. C), but not complicated low-level languages, like C++?

The official Rust book is targeted at novices with some programming experience. There's also Rustlings https://github.com/rust-lang/rustlings for a more practical approach.

> When I tried to work with Rust a few years ago I found it utterly impenetrable. I just had no idea what the borrow checker was doing, did not understand what the error messages meant, and honestly couldn't even understand the documentation or the tutorials on the subject

The compiler diagnostics have improved a lot over time. It's quite possible that some of the examples you have in mind return better error messages.

> in Rust it's always been a nightmare for me. I just really don't grok the "lifetime" concept at all, it feels like I'm trying to learn academic computer science instead of a programming language.

Academic computer science calls lifetimes "regions", which is perhaps a clearer term. It's a fairly clean extension of the notion of scope that you'd also find in languages like C or Zig. It's really not that complex, even though the Rust community sometimes finds it difficult to convey the right intuitions.

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

#234

Post by elcritch »

bonzini wrote: post #224
elcritch wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps, though nothing there that's not been available for a while. To be fair Zig has integrated some of these features well. * MultiArrayList is convenient and easy to do in Rust, D, Nim. Odin seems built around it. * Arbitrary bit-size integers seem more gimmicky than anything and similar to struct bitfields in other languages (except Rust oddly). Most compilers don't even pack uint8/uint16's for performance reas…

What? 8- and 16-bit are never 32-bit aligned nor sized.

To clarify I meant comparing how int8/int16's are packed in structs vs struct bitfields. Can't recall about the stack rules. Here's more discussion:

http://www.catb.org/esr/structure-packing/

https://github.com/Twon/Alignment/blob/master/docs/alignment...

Also ARM for example doesn't have 8/16 bit registers so int8 or int16 will use a 32bit register:

https://stackoverflow.com/a/23716920

Curiosity got to me, perhaps Zig had improved significantly. So I compared the first benchmark I found (kostya/benchmarks/bf) with Zig with Nim. For the smaller input (bench.b) Zig did run with ~22% less RAM (about 20kB less).

However, for the larger input (mandel.b) Nim+ARC used ~33% less RAM in safe mode: Nim 2.163mb -d:release; Zig 2.884mb -O ReleaseSafe; Zig 2.687mb -O ReleaseFast. The Nim requires 0.5mb less ram and the code is ~40% shorter. I don't have time to try out the Rust or Go versions though.

edit: grammar

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

#235

Post by pizza234 »

npn wrote: post #117
pizza234 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crystal doesn't have built-in support for parallelism, let alone production-grade support. This is a significant lack for a modern language. For a language that is around 8 years old, this may be a serious problem, since the surrounding ecosystem has been probably written without parallelism in mind, and it may take a very long time to be updated (if ever).

> 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…

> hey 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

It depends on the domain. From a production perspective, an flag-gated functionality that has been experimental for two or more years, is not "built-in". Plus, as explained, the ecosystem (I think I've read even the stdlib) doesn't give guarantees about thread safety

For small-scall scripting, then sure, it could be useful - but anything will do. I've evaluated for use at my company, and discarded it, because of the lack of libraries. Sadly, this is a chicken-and-egg situation. I've also evaluated contributing to it, but I won't until multithreading is stable.

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

#236

Post by exikyut »

fyzix wrote: post #167
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…

Nim strikes a great balance. No need for a low level language for cli and general software. I liked crystal but the lack of support on windows and lackluster dev experience made me stick to Nim. Nim also can double as a web language by transpiling to JS.

I haven't properly looked into Nim yet, and the sibling comments here make for some interesting signalling.

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

#237

Post by throwamon »

quazar wrote: post #228
fyzix wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nim strikes a great balance. No need for a low level language for cli and general software. I liked crystal but the lack of support on windows and lackluster dev experience made me stick to Nim. Nim also can double as a web language by transpiling to JS.

I would not recommend Nim.

Thank you so much for such a profoundly insightful comment. I'm now even thinking of changing professions thanks to it.

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

#238

Post by gnuvince »

AndyKelley wrote: post #166
pcwalton wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By quarantining all memory forever. This is not a scalable solution because keeping one allocation in a 4kB page alive will leak the whole rest of the page. And if you don't quarantine all memory forever then use after free comes back. If it were that easy to solve UAF then C++ would have solved it by now. There is a scalable solution for UAF that doesn't involve introducing a lifetime/region system: garbage collecti…

The problem of a single allocation keeping a 4 KB page alive is something that you might commonly find with the C++ or Rust way of programming that encourages allocating many individual objects on the heap, but in Zig land this is pretty rare. In fact, compare a Zig implementation of a given application with an equivalent in any other language and you will find there is no contest with respect to the size of the memo…

> way of programming that encourages *allocating many individual objects* on the heap

Quoting and bolding. I think this is the thing that I need to change most about my own style of programming.

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

#239

Post by zigger69 »

puffoflogic wrote: post #192
zigger69 wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And in rust you just put `` in the right scope and you're done. This is perfectly explicit and you know exactly what's going on in your code. Everything is obvious.

You can execute arbitrary code on drop operations by implementing `std::ops::Drop` for a type.

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

#240

Post by tored »

coder543 wrote: post #200
StefanKarpinski wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heck, this is the entire memory management model of PHP, which I found shocking when I learned it, but makes sense given that the language is intended to generate web pages: just allocate, never reclaim the memory, then kill the process when you’re done.

Do you have any sources? Maybe some truly ancient version? PHP has done garbage collection (seemingly mixed with some reference counting, like Python) for at least 10 or 15 years... I didn't bother to keep searching for even older information, but nothing I saw indicated that PHP only released memory when the process for a request exited. I don't even think most mainstream uses of PHP have done the process-per-reques…

Correct, garbage collector was added to PHP 5.3, prior to 5.3 PHP did only reference counting. PHP 5.3 was released in June of 2009.

Here is a series of articles that describes it in detail

https://www.php.net/manual/en/features.gc.php

Especially look at this example where the same script is executed with and without GC

https://www.php.net/manual/en/features.gc.performance-consid...

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