Quick question, which maybe someone here can answer: I noticed that GitHub supports syntax highlighting in the Zig repo. How does that work for a new language such as Zig? Can you somehow upload a file which tells GitHub how you'd like programs written in your language to be displayed?
Zig self hosted compiler is now capable of building itself
121–130 of 285 posts
Re: Zig self hosted compiler is now capable of building itself
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think Zig prefers explicit memory management, because allocations may fail and should be handled explicitly, and because automatic deallocations lead to hard-to-predict lifetimes (excess memory usage, and bugs for resource handles that are destructed at hard to predict moments). These are things that a "systems language" programmer should put in the work to do correctly/near-optimally, and not ask the compiler to j…
And as we know from C, every developer is quite capable of taking care of use after free possible bugs.
The point of C and Zig is that you can solve any kind of problems with them. In particular there is much more to memory reclamation than garbage collectors or Rust's borrow checker. Some of the reclamation schemes offer wait-freedom, or efficiently support linearizable operations.
Re: Zig self hosted compiler is now capable of building itself
#123I 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…
I recommend C. Once you get the hang of it, it's as fast as writing Rust code (and you don't have to think about borrow checks).
Yeah, I sure love debugging segfaults. I've used C before and it was cool to learn but I haven't used it since.
Re: Zig self hosted compiler is now capable of building itself
#124Quick question, which maybe someone here can answer: I noticed that GitHub supports syntax highlighting in the Zig repo. How does that work for a new language such as Zig? Can you somehow upload a file which tells GitHub how you'd like programs written in your language to be displayed?
I believe this is the syntax highlighter’s repo: https://github.com/github/linguist/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING....
Re: Zig self hosted compiler is now capable of building itself
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
Congratulations with the milestone! Does using Zig over C++ lead to "less memory, and represents a modest performance"? Or was the C++ implementation a bit sloppy? (lacking data oriented design for instance) Also, what specifically are you most excited using Zig for?
Thanks :) The new Zig implementation is certainly more well designed than the C++ implementation, for several reasons: * It's the second implementation of the language * It did not have to survive as much evolution and language churn * I leveled up as a programmer over the last 7 years * The Zig language safety and debugging features make it possible to do things I would never dream of attempting in C++ for fear of f…
Impressive work getting Zig self-hosting. However:
> As for less memory, I think this is simply a clear win for Zig. No other modern languages compete with the tiny memory footprints of Zig software.
Is not true at all. There are several other modern languages that compete with Zig for small memory footprints.
Re: Zig self hosted compiler is now capable of building itself
#126Probably a stupid question, but is LLVM a sort of cheat for "self compiling"? Shouldn't you need to compile LLVM as well?
It used to be the case that a compiler compiled itself to bare metal machine instructions, but now with so many cpu instruction set targets that's no longer the case. LLVM uses an intermediate language like an assemby language. Another way to look at it is the TypeScript compiler compiles itself which is written in TypeScript but the intermediate language is JavaScript. V8 handles the translation of JavaScript to mac…
> It used to be the case that a compiler compiled itself to bare metal machine instructions, but now with so many cpu instruction set targets that's no longer the case.
Tons of compilers emit machine code.
Re: Zig self hosted compiler is now capable of building itself
#127Quick question, which maybe someone here can answer: I noticed that GitHub supports syntax highlighting in the Zig repo. How does that work for a new language such as Zig? Can you somehow upload a file which tells GitHub how you'd like programs written in your language to be displayed?
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Re: Zig self hosted compiler is now capable of building itself
#128Best alternative to C, built with solid foundation to ensure fast compile speed, fast iteration, and easy to maintain code
I don't understand why people want fast compile speeds so much. My day job is/was writing C on something that requires 30+ minutes for one compilation run. It feels like people want fast compilation speeds because they need to keep running their software for some reason. Fast compilation speeds are a nice to have but basically irrelevant for normal developing of software in my experience.
Developers have to wait while your compiler runs. You’re paying your compiler at your engineer hourly rate, if you like. That’s very expensive!
Re: Zig self hosted compiler is now capable of building itself
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
Additionally, not all GCs are made alike, and languages like D, F#, C#, Nim, Swift, among others, also offer value types and manual memory management, if desired.
Also Swift and Nim w/ ARC use reference counting, which generally give much better latency and lower memory overhead. Reference counting is part of the reason iOS devices don’t need as much RAM. Nim’s ARC system also doesn’t use atomic or locks which means it’s runtime overhead is very low. I use it successfully on embedded devices for microsecond timed events with no large tail latencies.
Reference counting is a GC algorithm.
I wouldn't buy into much Apple marketing regarding its performance though,
https://github.com/ixy-languages/ixy-languages
It makes sense in the context of tracing GC having been a failure in Objective-C due to its C semantics, while automating Cocoa's retain/release calls was much safer approach. Swift naturally built on top of that due to interoperability with Objective-C frameworks.
Nim has taken other optimizations into consideration, however only in the new ORC implementation.
Still, all of them are much better than managing memory manually.
Re: Zig self hosted compiler is now capable of building itself
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
Zig as the “Kotlin of C” makes it very appealing. Kotlin has seen fantastic adoption in JVM projects because you can convert files one at a time from .java to .kt, with only a modicum of one-time build system shenanigans up front. Then your team can gain experience gradually, fill in missing pieces like linters over time, all without redesigning your software. What zig offers is even better - because zig included a C…
Kotlin has seen fantastic adoption in Android projects, because of the way Google pushes it, while stagnating Android Java on purpose. On the JVM world not really. https://www.infoq.com/news/2022/03/jrebel-report-2022/
That poll pours a cold bucket of water on “fantastic adoption” among all the respondents, but compare adoption of Kotlin and Java releases after Kotlin’s release. 1 in 6 respondents using language versions after 2016 are using Kotlin. I don’t think that’s too shabby.