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Zig Is Self-Hosted Now, What's Next?
151–159 of 159 posts
Re: Zig Is Self-Hosted Now, What's Next?
#152To all people complaining about bugs: 1. It's easy to find flaws in hard, ambitious projects. All ambitious projects start out as WIPs. 2. It is much harder to do an ambitious project. Try to be in the 2nd group.
But here's the thing about that though, when it comes to other languages which are not 1.0, various people will bash and troll to no end about any flaw, bug, or mistake they can find. Hell, even smear the developers at will.
How many times have we seen people dogging the hell out of Jai, Odin, Vlang, Carbon (that just started), and other newbies? People will dog other languages out and even compare them to 10 year old or older languages, without blinking.
Re: Zig Is Self-Hosted Now, What's Next?
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
Zig is not the first new language I try. I was an excited early adopted of a lot of many languages including D, Go, Rust and TypeScript. At no point to I remember running into miscompilations on rather fundamental issues and so quickly. So I do think this is quite out of the ordinary.
Consulting Wikipedia's "first appeared" field for each: D: 8 December 2001; 20 years ago Go: November 10, 2009; 12 years ago Rust: July 7, 2010; 12 years ago TypeScript: 1 October 2012; 10 years ago Zig: 8 February 2016; 6 years ago The only one of these which isn't at least twice as old as Zig is TypeScript, which has the might of Microsoft behind it, and is based on a well understood, pre-existing language. This is…
However, when it comes to comparing just as old or even newer languages than Zig, such as Odin, Jai, Vlang, Carbon, etc... Various people have no mercy whatsoever.
Re: Zig Is Self-Hosted Now, What's Next?
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
The level of optimization available back then is a far cry from what we have today, as far as I've ever heard or seen. Based on looking at some histories of GCC, the EGCS fork in 1997 was responsible for starting to introduce meaningful optimizations into GCC, such as global CSE (common subexpression elimination), and that wasn’t merged back into mainline GCC until years later. LLVM didn’t really hit its stride until…
https://ftp.gnu.org/old-gnu/gcc/ has old GCC versions. Eg checking the manpage gcc.1 from the 2.7 tarball there's inlining, loop unrolling, strength reduction, cse, peephole, instruction scheduling, jump threading, and others, probably better described in thebtexinfo doc. There are opts not covered in the command line options. Eg see this discussion of tail call optimizations already in GCC 1.x: https://groups.google…
Happened to continue my browsing for compiler history and found also this interesting rationale for a new version of the Dhrystone benchmark from 1988 where they say that the previous version was too badly broken by optimizing compilers: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/47907.47911
The languages are interesting as well (versions for C, Pascal and Ada).
So this places the wide use of optimizing compilers earlier than the 16MB era, 1988 was sub-1 MB era for personal computers, VAX class minis might have had 16 MB (but in multiuser context, compilers probably wouldn't use nearly that much memory)
But of course the later Dhrystone was also later broken by improved compiler optimizations, supporting the notion that compilers did keep improving as well.
Also as another tangent, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CMU_Common_Lisp the CMUCL Python compiler (famous for its optimizations) was started in 1985 and had to be fairly good at optimizing already by the mid-90s 16MB era. I found some release notes from 1993 that talk about optimizations: https://trac.common-lisp.net/cmucl/wiki/Release17c (summarized as "Improvements in compiler source-level optimization, inline expansion and instruction scheduling")
Re: Zig Is Self-Hosted Now, What's Next?
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep, I've also run into a myriad of gotchas while building things or poking around in written code. Just last week I was trying to build someone's year old repo that blew up on nightly, yet compiled on 0.9 just fine. But - it's plastered all over the entire project that it is a work in progress. This post itself is talking about how for loops are getting broken. It's an ambitious project with a talented and ambitious…
> Just last week I was trying to build someone's year old repo that blew up on nightly, yet compiled on 0.9 just fine. Isn’t that the point of nightly
I need to use nightly because my code makes the stable compiler crash, so...
Re: Zig Is Self-Hosted Now, What's Next?
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
The argument that you were making (unless I misunderstood you) is that there are more important issues for the language than correctness or appealing to early adopters to which I made the remark that this attitude is steering me away from the language. Zig is in a weird spot because it has a similar momentum behind it than some other languages I was exited about, it has even more hype (and is very hype driven with st…
> The argument that you were making (unless I misunderstood you) is that there are more important issues for the language than correctness or appealing to early adopters to which I made the remark that this attitude is steering me away from the language. Yes, and I still stand by my assertion. Next to you in the "early adopter spectrum" are people who can put up with more breakage on one side, and people who cannot p…
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Re: Zig Is Self-Hosted Now, What's Next?
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
The argument that you were making (unless I misunderstood you) is that there are more important issues for the language than correctness or appealing to early adopters to which I made the remark that this attitude is steering me away from the language. Zig is in a weird spot because it has a similar momentum behind it than some other languages I was exited about, it has even more hype (and is very hype driven with st…
> The argument that you were making (unless I misunderstood you) is that there are more important issues for the language than correctness or appealing to early adopters to which I made the remark that this attitude is steering me away from the language. Yes, and I still stand by my assertion. Next to you in the "early adopter spectrum" are people who can put up with more breakage on one side, and people who cannot p…
> Hype driven... you mean Andrew's 100 viewer streams? Or my 30 viewer streams?
More like release notes with 1,000 upvotes on Reddit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/rl87pr/zig_pro...
Re: Zig Is Self-Hosted Now, What's Next?
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
If bugs are your concern, then this upcoming release is good news for you. Total number of open bug reports is 1,124. However if we remove bugs labeled "stage1" - that is - bugs that are no longer applicable because this release changes the default compiler to the self-hosted one - then the number drops to 514. It would be a fair characterization to say that this release cuts the number of known bugs in half. We have…
Does/will Zig support the Actually Portable Executable format? https://justine.lol/ape.html
I believe where this stands is that if someone were to contribute and maintain this, then it could be part of the Zig compiler, however it is not something the Zig team themselves are planning on doing. Maybe give it a shot? I personally find the project interesting and fun but I'm not convinced that it's a good solution.
Re: Zig Is Self-Hosted Now, What's Next?
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Is it getting hype before it's ready? Will it be able to recover from that? Isn't that the very definition of hype? :^) We can't hide in a cave to build everything in secret until it's ready because otherwise we wouldn't have the money to pay contributors, or we would be forced to get funding through other means (I mention that point in the blog post). And while we do want to be in the open, you can see that in my…
> We can't hide in a cave to build everything in secret until it's ready because otherwise we wouldn't have the money to pay contributors, or we would be forced to get funding through other means (I mention that point in the blog post). Can you see though how this model can cause a lack of trust in external observers? Your development model is reliant on attracting attention to drive funding. There are some major inc…
> Can you see though how this model can cause a lack of trust in external observers? Your development model is reliant on attracting attention to drive funding. There are some major incentive problems here... You just need to make something appealing enough that people start using it and then, once they are invested in the language, some of them may be willing to pay you to fix the issues they find or build new features that would be useful to them.
As also a 3rd party observer, there is an obvious partial counter to the argument that you made. In the case of free and open-source, people are investing money or time because they believe in the product and its potential usefulness. That the product will deliver, for all people invested and for all users, is clearly unrealistic. There is no such thing as a "sure thing". It's more a matter of if the product delivers for enough people. And if anything, if unsatisfied, people are free to jump to the next candidate or savior that floats by.
I think the more valid aspect of the point presented, is the lack of trust or suspicions coming from when the hype is paid for and doesn't come from the grassroots and actual users. To include, negative propaganda campaigns targeting competing languages.
> If the language didn't have issues, there would be no reason to pay you to fix them.
All languages will have issues. I've always found this curious about people having such expectations. Maybe the argument is more valid in terms of the total amount of issues and bugs, but then that would need to be a fair and relative comparison to other languages. There is no such thing as a bug-free perfect language. While other parts of your post were "more valid" or at least points worth considering, I think on this point, it kind of fell off the mark.
> I know I will likely get downvoted for this but I believe in what I say.
Odd, that's exactly what happened. The tribalism is arguably too severe, which may relate to the money involved, that the downvoting is so predictable.