Writing a C Compiler, in Zig (2025)
1–10 of 74 posts
Re: Writing a C Compiler, in Zig (2025)
#2Cool project. Feels like writing a C compiler in Zig aligns nicely with the old "maintain it in Zig" idea that was part of Zig's early value proposition. Is that still considered a relevant goal today?
Longer term it also makes me wonder whether something like this could eventually reduce reliance on Clang/LLVM for the C frontend in zig's toolchain.
Re: Writing a C Compiler, in Zig (2025)
#3Looking at the repo, the author seemed a little fed up [1] with the nature of lower level language and quitted.
[1] https://github.com/asibahi/paella/blob/main/writeup/c19.md#u...
Re: Writing a C Compiler, in Zig (2025)
#4I thought Zig has a C compiler built in? Or is it just the Zig build system that's able to compile C, but uses an external compiler for that?
Still a proper programmer-flex to build another one.
Re: Writing a C Compiler, in Zig (2025)
#5Looking at the repo, the author seemed a little fed up [1] with the nature of lower level language and quitted. [1] https://github.com/asibahi/paella/blob/main/writeup/c19.md#u...
Feels like maybe something lost in translation with their explanation - they say they were fed up of data structures etc. but they returned to Rust? I’m assuming there’s something a bit more nuanced about what they got tired of with Zig
Re: Writing a C Compiler, in Zig (2025)
#6I thought Zig has a C compiler built in? Or is it just the Zig build system that's able to compile C, but uses an external compiler for that? Still a proper programmer-flex to build another one.
Zig actually bundles LLVM's Clang, which it uses to compile C with the `zig cc` command. But the long term goal seems to not be so tightly coupled to LLVM, so I'm expecting that to move elsewhere. They still do some clever stuff around compiler-rt, allowing it to be better at cross-compilation than raw Clang, but the bulk of it is mostly just Clang.
There is also another C compiler written in Zig, Aro[1], which seems to be much more complete than TFA. Zig started using that as a library for its TranslateC functionality (for translating C headers into Zig, not whole programs) in 0.16.
Re: Writing a C Compiler, in Zig (2025)
#7Cool project. Feels like writing a C compiler in Zig aligns nicely with the old "maintain it in Zig" idea that was part of Zig's early value proposition. Is that still considered a relevant goal today? Longer term it also makes me wonder whether something like this could eventually reduce reliance on Clang/LLVM for the C frontend in zig's toolchain.
There is actually another C compiler written in Zig, Aro[1], which Zig started using since 0.16 for its TranslateC module.
Re: Writing a C Compiler, in Zig (2025)
#8Looking at the repo, the author seemed a little fed up [1] with the nature of lower level language and quitted. [1] https://github.com/asibahi/paella/blob/main/writeup/c19.md#u...
Feels like maybe something lost in translation with their explanation - they say they were fed up of data structures etc. but they returned to Rust? I’m assuming there’s something a bit more nuanced about what they got tired of with Zig
I think Rust is "higher level" than C or Zig in the sense that there are most abstractions than C or Zig. Its not Javascript, but it is possible to program Rust without worrying too much about low level concerns.
Re: Writing a C Compiler, in Zig (2025)
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
Feels like maybe something lost in translation with their explanation - they say they were fed up of data structures etc. but they returned to Rust? I’m assuming there’s something a bit more nuanced about what they got tired of with Zig
I think Rust is "higher level" than C or Zig in the sense that there are most abstractions than C or Zig. Its not Javascript, but it is possible to program Rust without worrying too much about low level concerns.
Which is still a crazy claim considering Rust is often told about having strong bureaucracy around even sharing variables (borrow checker).
Re: Writing a C Compiler, in Zig (2025)
#10Looking at the repo, the author seemed a little fed up [1] with the nature of lower level language and quitted. [1] https://github.com/asibahi/paella/blob/main/writeup/c19.md#u...
Feels like maybe something lost in translation with their explanation - they say they were fed up of data structures etc. but they returned to Rust? I’m assuming there’s something a bit more nuanced about what they got tired of with Zig
Rust is a world away from Zig as far as being low-level. Rust does not have manual memory management and revolves around RAII which hides a great deal of complexity from you. Moreover it is not unusual for a Rust project to have 300+ dependencies that deal with data structures, synchronization, threading etc. Zig has a rich std lib, but is otherwise very bare and expects you to implement the things you actually want.