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Zig Is Self-Hosted Now, What's Next?

kristoff.it

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Re: Zig Is Self-Hosted Now, What's Next?

#91

Post by the_mitsuhiko »

kristoff_it wrote: post #31
mattgreenrocks wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you substantiate this further? I don't see how basic stuff like that could be subtly buggy, the Zig devs are very qualified IMO.

We do have a good number of known miscompilations, I can substantiate for the parent poster with a simple link: https://github.com/ziglang/zig/labels/miscompilation It's also true that the self-hosted compiler has caused new bugs to pop up, which in turn made us write new behavior tests. To me that's to be expected with every project aimed at rewriting an existing system. It's also true that proper testing infrastruc…

> Eh, yes, but also no. Obviously a compiler needs to work correctly to be useful, but our priority right now is to move the project forward using our best judgment, not ensure that it has maximal utility to early adopters.

I feel like I’m a potential early adopter and the amount of miscompilation I ran into playing around with it really made me lose interest. It seems like the priorities are set somewhere else entirely.

Re: Zig Is Self-Hosted Now, What's Next?

#92

Post by _7bxa »

To 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.

Re: Zig Is Self-Hosted Now, What's Next?

#93

Post by the_mitsuhiko »

_7bxa wrote: post #92

To 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.

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.

Re: Zig Is Self-Hosted Now, What's Next?

#94

Post by nicoburns »

j-pb wrote: post #77
AndyKelley wrote: post #36

Earlier 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…

The bug that's currently blocking me from any work using master is https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/12325 That's not really a bug related to unfinished features that might get replaced anyways, but simply one involving recursive structs with pointers between, i.e. linked lists. Not detecting issues like these feels less like a "these parts are unfinished hence here be dragons" thing and more like a fundamental c…

You're using the master branch of a pre-1.0 tool, and you expect it to be stable without regressions? I feel like your expectations are too high.

Re: Zig Is Self-Hosted Now, What's Next?

#95

Post by DrNosferatu »

kuramitropolis wrote: post #51
AndyKelley wrote: post #36

Earlier 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

This. Also have this very same question / use “Cosmopolitan” LibC with Zig.

- Zig Team?

Thanks in advance.

Re: Zig Is Self-Hosted Now, What's Next?

#96

Post by kristoff_it »

the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #91
kristoff_it wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We do have a good number of known miscompilations, I can substantiate for the parent poster with a simple link: https://github.com/ziglang/zig/labels/miscompilation It's also true that the self-hosted compiler has caused new bugs to pop up, which in turn made us write new behavior tests. To me that's to be expected with every project aimed at rewriting an existing system. It's also true that proper testing infrastruc…

> Eh, yes, but also no. Obviously a compiler needs to work correctly to be useful, but our priority right now is to move the project forward using our best judgment, not ensure that it has maximal utility to early adopters. I feel like I’m a potential early adopter and the amount of miscompilation I ran into playing around with it really made me lose interest. It seems like the priorities are set somewhere else entir…

Going by your own comment, you seem to not be an "early enough" adopter. That's totally fair, maybe Zig will be more interesting for you once it stabilizes more in the future.

Re: Zig Is Self-Hosted Now, What's Next?

#97

Post by throwawaymaths »

DrNosferatu wrote: post #90

Congrats Zig Team! Allow me to comment from my professional perspective: I have been working deep inside the spaghetti-stuffed soft underbelly of the computational infrastructures of multitudes of international “Big Science” projects and consortia. Zig seems like a very, very good fit. Are there any static code analysis tools that support it? Such functionality would be a killer app… Wild idea: what about building on…

It would be awesome if zig implemented compiler hooks, for example: shoot off messages at various stages (sema of files, zir on individual functions, linker events), with some sort of defined binary structure (ok if it's defined in zig itself!) at say a tcp port.

Re: Zig Is Self-Hosted Now, What's Next?

#98

Post by bsder »

raoulj wrote: post #35

What is the reason to not have a central package index? I find that having one speeds up my development significantly. Is there more reason than decentralization?

Decentralization is good.

I'm really not a fan of what has happened in the Rust community with crates.

The fact that there is a single blessed Rust crate source and the fact that the Rust community doesn't take responsibility for vetting crates means that maintainership changes, name squatting gold rush, and a whole host of pathological behaviors show up.

If you're not going to take responsibility, then the only option is to leave everything decentralized.

Re: Zig Is Self-Hosted Now, What's Next?

#100

Post by the_mitsuhiko »

kristoff_it wrote: post #96
the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Eh, yes, but also no. Obviously a compiler needs to work correctly to be useful, but our priority right now is to move the project forward using our best judgment, not ensure that it has maximal utility to early adopters. I feel like I’m a potential early adopter and the amount of miscompilation I ran into playing around with it really made me lose interest. It seems like the priorities are set somewhere else entir…

Going by your own comment, you seem to not be an "early enough" adopter. That's totally fair, maybe Zig will be more interesting for you once it stabilizes more in the future.

I don’t believe this to be true.

Zig is 6 years old now going by Wikipedia. In comparison I use Rust in an more extensive way than Zig for almost 20 years now. I for sure wrote more Rust in 2012 when it was ~2 years? old than Zig last year, yet I don’t remember miscompilations on that level. The same is true for my recollection of using very early D which however at this point was in an earlier life of mine and very fuzzy.

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