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Zig got a new ELF linker and it's fast

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Re: Zig got a new ELF linker and it's fast

#11

Post by olivia-banks »

stock_toaster wrote: post #9
olivia-banks wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I might be misunderstanding, but I don’t think that's quite accurate. As I understand it, Zig ships a Clang frontend and wraps it with precompiled sysroots. Unless they're developing an LLVM backend, I'm not sure how it could serve as a completely self-contained toolchain.

Zig does have its own native x86_64 backend for debug compilation. ref: https://ziglang.org/devlog/2025/#2025-06-08

They're also getting an aarch64 backend soon (or has it already landed)? Really looking forward to this one for development on my Mac!

My point was that Zig uses their backends (which includes their homegrown ones), but since `zig cc` is a wrapper around Clang, it always goes through the `LLVM` path and sidesteps the Zig backend(s).

Re: Zig got a new ELF linker and it's fast

#12

Post by olivia-banks »

chris_armstrong wrote: post #10
olivia-banks wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I might be misunderstanding, but I don’t think that's quite accurate. As I understand it, Zig ships a Clang frontend and wraps it with precompiled sysroots. Unless they're developing an LLVM backend, I'm not sure how it could serve as a completely self-contained toolchain.

zig has a cross-compiler frontend (zig cc) which can be used as a drop-in replacement for a custom sysroot + binutils + gcc for several platforms. I've used it to build OCaml cross-compilers that only depend on zig itself ( https://www.chrisarmstrong.dev/posts/ocaml-cross-compilation... ). There are other projects that have used it in a similar way too. [1] https://actually.fyi/posts/zig-makes-rust-cross-compilation-…

Interesting. OCaml cross compilation scared me the one time I considered it, so it's nice to know this is an option. I will be pedantic and say it isn't a replacement for a custom sysroot/binutils/whatnot, since it really just papers over those user-facing details by shipping a prebuilt collection of sysroots and using LLD. They sorta get this for free since they need it for cross-compiling Zig code anyways.

Re: Zig got a new ELF linker and it's fast

#13

Post by scuff3d »

olivia-banks wrote: post #5

The more I hear about Zig, the more I appreciate it. Its vertically integrated stack (with the custom linker and code-generation backends) stands out to me as a really compelling feature that enables interesting optimizations. The compiler is also much easier to interact with in a consistent way compared to C. I've been using it as an experimental backend for my language project with great results.

I've been writing Zig since the beginning of the year. Just playing around with some small stuff really. I want to love the language. It does so much right, but there's something about it just feels off to me. And then the recent Io change really bugged me.

Re: Zig got a new ELF linker and it's fast

#14

Post by olivia-banks »

scuff3d wrote: post #13
olivia-banks wrote: post #5

The more I hear about Zig, the more I appreciate it. Its vertically integrated stack (with the custom linker and code-generation backends) stands out to me as a really compelling feature that enables interesting optimizations. The compiler is also much easier to interact with in a consistent way compared to C. I've been using it as an experimental backend for my language project with great results.

I've been writing Zig since the beginning of the year. Just playing around with some small stuff really. I want to love the language. It does so much right, but there's something about it just feels off to me. And then the recent Io change really bugged me.

I agree with the "off" part. I've thought maybe it's the syntax? It's unclear, but I'm just hoping the feeling will go away! I find the IO changes to be strange, it's almost as if Zig is encoding an effect system a-la Haskell (i.e. this function will have an allocation/IO side effect).

Re: Zig got a new ELF linker and it's fast

#15

Post by sothatsit »

scuff3d wrote: post #13
olivia-banks wrote: post #5

The more I hear about Zig, the more I appreciate it. Its vertically integrated stack (with the custom linker and code-generation backends) stands out to me as a really compelling feature that enables interesting optimizations. The compiler is also much easier to interact with in a consistent way compared to C. I've been using it as an experimental backend for my language project with great results.

I've been writing Zig since the beginning of the year. Just playing around with some small stuff really. I want to love the language. It does so much right, but there's something about it just feels off to me. And then the recent Io change really bugged me.

I suspect a lot of this is due to the language being new and unpolished. Zig is still actively being shaped, and therefore fundamental pieces of the Zig standard library still change frequently.

I really like Zig, but I do think you have to accept some rough edges and breaking changes when using it. Give it another decade and I am hopeful it will be much more stable.

Re: Zig got a new ELF linker and it's fast

#16

Post by deagle50 »

scuff3d wrote: post #13
olivia-banks wrote: post #5

The more I hear about Zig, the more I appreciate it. Its vertically integrated stack (with the custom linker and code-generation backends) stands out to me as a really compelling feature that enables interesting optimizations. The compiler is also much easier to interact with in a consistent way compared to C. I've been using it as an experimental backend for my language project with great results.

I've been writing Zig since the beginning of the year. Just playing around with some small stuff really. I want to love the language. It does so much right, but there's something about it just feels off to me. And then the recent Io change really bugged me.

I have the same feeling, and my best guess is that it's the intentional (and imo arbitrary) friction that has been sprinkled into the language. And camelCase.

Re: Zig got a new ELF linker and it's fast

#17

Post by stock_toaster »

olivia-banks wrote: post #11
stock_toaster wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zig does have its own native x86_64 backend for debug compilation. ref: https://ziglang.org/devlog/2025/#2025-06-08

They're also getting an aarch64 backend soon (or has it already landed)? Really looking forward to this one for development on my Mac! My point was that Zig uses their backends (which includes their homegrown ones), but since `zig cc` is a wrapper around Clang, it always goes through the `LLVM` path and sidesteps the Zig backend(s).

Ah. I see what you are saying now. I believe you are correct.

Re: Zig got a new ELF linker and it's fast

#18

Post by rstat1 »

I don't really have much interest in Zig the language, but Zig as a standalone C/C++ compiler is pretty great.

I'm using it as a cross-compiler for linux-arm64 because its much simpler to download a single archive and extract it somewhere than to waste a bunch of time on guessing how each different Linux distro does ARM64 cross compilers (or doesn't in the case of Fedora).

Re: Zig got a new ELF linker and it's fast

#19

Post by scuff3d »

deagle50 wrote: post #16
scuff3d wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been writing Zig since the beginning of the year. Just playing around with some small stuff really. I want to love the language. It does so much right, but there's something about it just feels off to me. And then the recent Io change really bugged me.

I have the same feeling, and my best guess is that it's the intentional (and imo arbitrary) friction that has been sprinkled into the language. And camelCase.

Lol. Funny enough I actually like camel case because I've spent so much time in Java.

Yeah, I can see that. It's also difficult to put my finger on, but for a language that claims to be simple it seems to make a lot of things needlessly complicated. I'm also not loving how everything is deeply nested structs so I have to do struct.doThefirstThing.doTheSecondThing.doTheThirdThing().etc() all the time.

Re: Zig got a new ELF linker and it's fast

#20

Post by bsder »

olivia-banks wrote: post #14
scuff3d wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been writing Zig since the beginning of the year. Just playing around with some small stuff really. I want to love the language. It does so much right, but there's something about it just feels off to me. And then the recent Io change really bugged me.

I agree with the "off" part. I've thought maybe it's the syntax? It's unclear, but I'm just hoping the feeling will go away! I find the IO changes to be strange, it's almost as if Zig is encoding an effect system a-la Haskell (i.e. this function will have an allocation/IO side effect).

> I find the IO changes to be strange

Perhaps you just feel that way because of 10+ years of accreted expectations?

To me, it feels like a reinvention of an interesting idea: Fastbufs

https://www.ucw.cz/libucw/doc/ucw/fastbuf.html

I will concede that the ergonomics of Io in Zig right now are pretty rough sledding.

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