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How Our Rust-to-Zig Rewrite Is Going

rtfeldman.com

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Re: How Our Rust-to-Zig Rewrite Is Going

#11

Post by steveklabnik »

I think this is a fine post. But one comment:

> remember that for compilers which emit machine code, like roc and rustc, doing memory-unsafe things is a big part of the job

I don't really think that this is true, in the way that it's written.

I think that for the hot binary patching / code reloading features, yes, that is going to need unsafe. But for regular old "producing an executable" compilation? Emitting machine code isn't the part that requires unsafe. The language's runtime is a more likely site to find unsafe.

Re: How Our Rust-to-Zig Rewrite Is Going

#12

Post by landr0id »

>ReleaseSafe catches use-after-free errors through runtime checks which panic if the program tries to use freed memory.

I don't know Zig so maybe they know something I don't, but I have seen no evidence that it catches any type of use-after-free including double-free?

While writing a blog post (below) I went through the documentation to figure out the possible runtime memory safety checks Zig can insert. The term "use-after-free" or "UaF" never occurs on that documentation page. Searching for "safety-checked" doesn't yield any related hits either.

Unless maybe they're using the DebugAllocator in release builds? Even that does not reliably surface UaF.

https://landaire.net/memory-safety-by-default-is-non-negotia...

Re: How Our Rust-to-Zig Rewrite Is Going

#14

Post by arthurbrown »

Interesting that OCaml was flexible and expressive enough to be used as a prototype testbed but not chosen as the implementation language, especially given the maturity of both. I would be surprised if Zigs incremental builds could be meaningfully faster than dune's.

Cross compilation is great, but not mentioned in the "why Zig" section. Is memory control that crucial for a compiler?

Rust itself was originally written in OCaml, same with WASM. I'm curious about what milestone gets reached where the maintainers collectively decide to transition away.

Re: How Our Rust-to-Zig Rewrite Is Going

#15

Post by dnautics »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #3

Zig's incremental builds are DEFINITELY a killer feature. In the short term, I could see why you'd make a switch to get it. But, in the medium term, can we really not expect to see this in Rust in the somewhat near future? I want to go fast, but I don't want to go fast just to shoot my foot off. If only somehow we could get Rust's safety with all of Zig's features and Go's runtime without GC... That's what I'm workin…

> if only somehow we could get Rust's safety with all of Zig's features

i periodically throw my unused codex tokens at this:

https://github.com/ityonemo/clr

Re: How Our Rust-to-Zig Rewrite Is Going

#16

Post by dnautics »

lioeters wrote: post #7
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #3

Zig's incremental builds are DEFINITELY a killer feature. In the short term, I could see why you'd make a switch to get it. But, in the medium term, can we really not expect to see this in Rust in the somewhat near future? I want to go fast, but I don't want to go fast just to shoot my foot off. If only somehow we could get Rust's safety with all of Zig's features and Go's runtime without GC... That's what I'm workin…

Instead of waiting for faster compiler in Rust, how about from the other direction, adding some kind of borrow checker to Zig? That sounds more within reach and practically achievable, possibly even in userland.

> how about from the other direction, adding some kind of borrow checker to Zig? That sounds more within reach and practically achievable, possibly even in userland.

It's doable, and as static analysis. see sibling comment.

Re: How Our Rust-to-Zig Rewrite Is Going

#17

Post by steveklabnik »

arthurbrown wrote: post #14

Interesting that OCaml was flexible and expressive enough to be used as a prototype testbed but not chosen as the implementation language, especially given the maturity of both. I would be surprised if Zigs incremental builds could be meaningfully faster than dune's. Cross compilation is great, but not mentioned in the "why Zig" section. Is memory control that crucial for a compiler? Rust itself was originally writte…

Rust moved away from OCaml when it decided to be re-written in Rust. The post alludes to this as being a usual time for a wholesale re-write, and I'd agree.

Re: How Our Rust-to-Zig Rewrite Is Going

#19

Post by dev_l1x_be »

Zig is a pre-1.0 language while Rust is post-1.0. This alone is settles which one to pick for may developers. The library support is probably favours Rust too. Rust build times are much slower than Zig, I get that, but I rarely optimize software for build times.

Re: How Our Rust-to-Zig Rewrite Is Going

#20

Post by [deleted] »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #3

Zig's incremental builds are DEFINITELY a killer feature. In the short term, I could see why you'd make a switch to get it. But, in the medium term, can we really not expect to see this in Rust in the somewhat near future? I want to go fast, but I don't want to go fast just to shoot my foot off. If only somehow we could get Rust's safety with all of Zig's features and Go's runtime without GC... That's what I'm workin…

[deleted]
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