> Memory usage is improved by a factor of about 3x. For Zig, building itself went from using 9.1 GiB to 2.7 GiB. Pretty impressive.
Not bad. For comparison Nim builds itself using just 668MiB.
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Zig is now self–hosted by default
51–60 of 115 posts
Re: Zig is now self–hosted by default
#52I never understood why "self-hosting" is considered a good thing. Sure, the compiler developers can write in their favorite language and I guess it means the language is stable enough to be used in a complex project; however requiring an (older) compiler to build the compiler seems a significant complication for software distributions. You either have to set up an ever increasing chain of compilers, as the complexity…
Because a large motivation of developing a new language is wanting to program in that new language. Being forced to keep programming in C can become very frustrating.
Re: Zig is now self–hosted by default
#53I never understood why "self-hosting" is considered a good thing. Sure, the compiler developers can write in their favorite language and I guess it means the language is stable enough to be used in a complex project; however requiring an (older) compiler to build the compiler seems a significant complication for software distributions. You either have to set up an ever increasing chain of compilers, as the complexity…
I understand that C is the same way and that there are benefits for language developers in using their own language, so I can't complain too loudly about languages that do this, but I can attest to the "nightmare" that this creates. I have personally ported java to an operating system that didn't previously have a java compiler. A colleague recently ported rust. Neither had usable cross-compilers. Both require a compiler of their own language to build their own compilers. It's a _giant_ pain in the neck.
I wish that all language devs would provide a way of compiling the build tools with something that nearly everybody already has, like C or C++. Having language support baked into a commonly used compiler like gcc is also nice. I think there are good efforts to get a rust compiler into gcc, and I believe it already works for Go and D and a few others. Such things make adoption outside the standard Windows/Linux world much, much easier.
Re: Zig is now self–hosted by default
#54I never understood why "self-hosting" is considered a good thing. Sure, the compiler developers can write in their favorite language and I guess it means the language is stable enough to be used in a complex project; however requiring an (older) compiler to build the compiler seems a significant complication for software distributions. You either have to set up an ever increasing chain of compilers, as the complexity…
If Zig is built on a C compiler, and (I assume) the C compiler self-hosts, then if Zig starts to self-host, it doesn't _introduce_ the dependency on a chain of previously built binaries, it just makes it a step more severe while removing a dependency.
Would you prefer if Zig not only didn't self-host, but didn't have any self-hosting dependencies? For your ideal compiler, would a full build from scratch require making a platform-specific assembler from machine code, then a few stages of successively higher-level languages?
Re: Zig is now self–hosted by default
#55I never understood why "self-hosting" is considered a good thing. Sure, the compiler developers can write in their favorite language and I guess it means the language is stable enough to be used in a complex project; however requiring an (older) compiler to build the compiler seems a significant complication for software distributions. You either have to set up an ever increasing chain of compilers, as the complexity…
I understand that C is the same way and that there are benefits for language developers in using their own language, so I can't complain too loudly about languages that do this, but I can attest to the "nightmare" that this creates. I have personally ported java to an operating system that didn't previously have a java compiler. A colleague recently ported rust. Neither had usable cross-compilers. Both require a comp…
Zig in particular stands out for having strong support for cross-compiling. I wonder how much simpler that makes adding a new platform to a self-hosted language, and what challenges persist?
Re: Zig is now self–hosted by default
#56I never understood why "self-hosting" is considered a good thing. Sure, the compiler developers can write in their favorite language and I guess it means the language is stable enough to be used in a complex project; however requiring an (older) compiler to build the compiler seems a significant complication for software distributions. You either have to set up an ever increasing chain of compilers, as the complexity…
I understand that C is the same way and that there are benefits for language developers in using their own language, so I can't complain too loudly about languages that do this, but I can attest to the "nightmare" that this creates. I have personally ported java to an operating system that didn't previously have a java compiler. A colleague recently ported rust. Neither had usable cross-compilers. Both require a comp…
I believe the long-term goal is to implement a C backend for the compiler (compile Zig code to C). Then compile the Zig compiler (which is written in Zig) to C, so you can compile that on your target system which only has a C compiler. Then you can use that to rebuild the native Zig compiler on that system.
Re: Zig is now self–hosted by default
#57To clarify what this means, since things can get confusing with subtle differences in wordings: * stage1 is when zig is built from C++ code[1] (the "bootstrap" compiler) using system C/C++ compiler toolchain. * stage2 is when zig is built from Zig code[2] using stage1. * stage3 is when zig is rebuilt from the same Zig code[2] using stage2. Before today, zig would give you stage1 by default, and you could opt in to st…
Thanks for the context! What's the difference between the stage2 and stage3 binary? Does stage1 produce different binaries for the same input compared to stage2/stage3?
Ideally there should be no difference and building stage 3 is basically a sanity check to ensure the compiler is working correctly.
Re: Zig is now self–hosted by default
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
I found this IntelliJ IDEA plugin, the list of features looks pretty good already: https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/10560-zig
That one hasn't been updated in a while, but this one is under active development: https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/18062-zig-support
I saw that one as well, but there are hardly any features. I'm mostly looking for "go to declaration/definition", "find usages" and others which turn codebase into basically a browsable hypertext.
Re: Zig is now self–hosted by default
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
I understand that C is the same way and that there are benefits for language developers in using their own language, so I can't complain too loudly about languages that do this, but I can attest to the "nightmare" that this creates. I have personally ported java to an operating system that didn't previously have a java compiler. A colleague recently ported rust. Neither had usable cross-compilers. Both require a comp…
Zig in particular stands out for having strong support for cross-compiling. I wonder how much simpler that makes adding a new platform to a self-hosted language, and what challenges persist?
I actually wouldn't mind porting Zig to our OS; right now it seems it would be pretty easy, and looks like they're going to make the bootstrapping process pretty straight forward in the future as well. I just wish other languages would do the same... Unfortunately for me, we don't have any users that need Zig right now and all my other side-projects are higher priority. I'll probably give it a try eventually though.
Re: Zig is now self–hosted by default
#60> Memory usage is improved by a factor of about 3x. For Zig, building itself went from using 9.1 GiB to 2.7 GiB. Pretty impressive.
Not bad. For comparison Nim builds itself using just 668MiB.
Nice work!
I suspect the difference mainly comes down to the fact that Zig compiles everything into a single compilation unit. As you can see, this has tradeoffs. It produces better code (single-compilation-unit is what "LTO" approximates) but it requires more memory and more code needs to be rebuilt on changes.