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Zig self hosted compiler is now capable of building itself

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Re: Zig self hosted compiler is now capable of building itself

#171

Post by Tozen »

cercatrova wrote: post #32

I 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…

Besides Rust and Zig, you might want to check out Vlang and Odin, who are in the same category.

Re: Zig self hosted compiler is now capable of building itself

#173

Post by mlindner »

kortex wrote: post #110
mlindner wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The longer the delay between writing some chunk of code, and executing it, the more valuable mental context is lost. I find it way more productive to work in small chunks iteratively, testing as I go along, rather than writing for a long chunk of time, then running tests and figuring out what bugs are making tests fail.

I only compile a couple of times per day max usually. Sometimes I won't compile at all in a day.

Re: Zig self hosted compiler is now capable of building itself

#174

Post by cercatrova »

Tozen wrote: post #171
cercatrova wrote: post #32

I 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…

Besides Rust and Zig, you might want to check out Vlang and Odin, who are in the same category.

I remember reading a lot of controversy about V back when I first heard about it so I decided not to look into it further [0], but I'll take a look again. Odin looks interesting, Pony does as well.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25511556

Re: Zig self hosted compiler is now capable of building itself

#175

Post by mlindner »

hu3 wrote: post #93
mlindner wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sorry I may have missed the sarcasm. Your day job project takes half an hour to compile and you don't see the point in speeding that up?

It wasn't sarcasm. My "irrelevant" point meant "it's irrelevant for a factor in picking a language", as in "it doesn't significantly contribute to whether a project is possible in the long term".

If compile times are longer you just compile less often and write larger portions of code at a time and you generally keep writing code while it compiles.

Re: Zig self hosted compiler is now capable of building itself

#176

Post by einpoklum »

AndyKelley wrote: post #4

Hello HN! Here is some context to decorate this announcement: The Zig self-hosted compiler codebase consists of 197,549 lines of code. There are several different backends, each at varying levels of completion. Here is how many behavior tests are passing: LLVM: 1101/1138 (97%) WASM: 919/1138 (81%) C: 740/1138 (65%) x86_64: 725/1138 (64%) arm: 490/1138 (43%) aarch64: 411/1138 (36%) As you might guess, the one that thi…

* What kind of tests are these "behavior test"?

* Is that a list of compilation targets?

* If not all behavior tests pass, does that not mean that the compiler fails to compile programs correctly?

Please indulge those of us who are not familiar with self-hosting compiler engineering.

Re: Zig self hosted compiler is now capable of building itself

#177

Post by capableweb »

lijogdfljk wrote: post #79
cercatrova wrote: post #32

I 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…

It's funny i came to Rust from Go, Python, NodeJS, etc after a combined .. 15 years or so. I've been using Rust full time (work & home) for ~2 years now. Obviously i'm biased, but i quite enjoy it. I find i am more efficient now than before, because it manages to give me the ease of the "easier" languages quite often with a rich set of tooling when i need to go deeper. Personally i feel the concern over the borrow ch…

The perspective of someone who is learning Rust (but not professionally) during the last few months. :

- The borrow checker is one of the easier parts of Rust to grok, it's just as you say, not that complicated in the end.

- Traits are more annoying to understand and find in source code when they can get added from anywhere, and suddenly you code gets extra functionality, or it's missing the right one unless you import the right crate but there is no "back-reference" so you're not clear what crate the code actually comes from.

- Crates/libraries are harder to grok with their mod.rs/lib.rs files and whatnot, in order to structure your application over many files.

- Macros are truly horrible in Rust, both to write and debug, but then my only experience with macros are with Clojure, where writing macros is basically just writing normal code and works basically the same way

- Compilation times when you start using it for larger projects tend to be kind of awful. Some crates makes this even worse (like tauri, bevy) and you need to be careful on what you add as some can have a dramatic impact on compilation speed

- The async ecosystem is not as mature as it seems on first look. I'm really looking forward to it all stabilizing in the future. Some libraries support only sync code, others only async but only via tokio, others using other async libraries. Read somewhere that eventually it'll be possible to interop between them, time will tell.

- Control flow with Option/Result and everything that comes with it is surprisingly nice and something I'm replicating when using other languages (mainly a Clojure developer by day) now.

My development journey was PHP -> JavaScript -> Ruby -> Golang -> Clojure with doing them all the capacity of backend/frontend/infrastructure/everything in-between, freelancing/consulting/working full-time at long term companies, so take my perspective with that in mind. Rust would be my first "low-level" language that I've used in larger capacity.

Re: Zig self hosted compiler is now capable of building itself

#178

Post by vanderZwan »

riffraff wrote: post #100
AndyKelley wrote: post #4

Hello HN! Here is some context to decorate this announcement: The Zig self-hosted compiler codebase consists of 197,549 lines of code. There are several different backends, each at varying levels of completion. Here is how many behavior tests are passing: LLVM: 1101/1138 (97%) WASM: 919/1138 (81%) C: 740/1138 (65%) x86_64: 725/1138 (64%) arm: 490/1138 (43%) aarch64: 411/1138 (36%) As you might guess, the one that thi…

it's so surprising to hear there was a Zig Meetup in Milan, I'd not expect a large enough community to exist there, pretty cool!

Probably a significant chunk of the larger European community was represented there too - don't forget that traveling to EU countries is relatively easy for EU citizens

Re: Zig self hosted compiler is now capable of building itself

#179

Post by elcritch »

geodel wrote: post #146
elcritch wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Would you tell about those languages or they are left as an exercise to readers?

Sort of left it to the readers and hopefully encourage people to investigate for themselves. It's far too easy to get into "this benchmark vs this benchmark", etc. Memory usage is overall a complicated topic, which I think Andrew's comment doesn't do justice to. Granted the Zig team has done some impressive work, much of the memory usage & bloat in the C++ world comes from real world programs and libraries and the inevitable drift in program architecture over time.

However, I could believe Zig's stdlib and culture encourages low memory footprints, but there isn't anything novel in the language that makes it inherently lower memory footprint. Though to name a few languages I'd say that can be directly comparable are Rust, D (esp. BetterC mode), and Nim. Even Julia & Go in the right context. Though honestly I often prefer wasting a few hundred bytes of RAM here and there, even on a microcontroller, for pure convenience.

edit: forgot Odin. Another comment mentioned it, though I've never used it. It looks like it's used in production.

Re: Zig self hosted compiler is now capable of building itself

#180

Post by jonpalmisc »

Tozen wrote: post #170
jonpalmisc wrote: post #6

I think Zig’s compatibility with C is such a valuable feature. I also wish we could rewrite everything in a modern language, but the reality is that we can’t and that if we could, it would take a LONG time. The ability to start new projects, or extend existing ones, with a modern and more ergonomic language—Zig—and be able to seamlessly work with C is incredible. I look forward to the self-hosted compiler being compl…

Zig is not the only one. Other newer languages like Vlang, Odin, Rust, Nim... offer strong C interop.

Can’t speak about the others, but Rust’s C interop is nothing like Zig’s, not to mention that Zig can also compile C.
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