Comment by dleslie
3 years ago
Cool, you've targeted ARM on a common SoC and a desktop PC. Now do sh2, sh4, m68k or even xtensa with Zig with a standard build.
They chose to build Zig on top of the worst compiler backend toolchain for embedded support.
Man, it hasn’t even fucking reached 1.0 yet. The fact that the default install can target multiple architectures (including C dependencies) is nothing short of impressive.
Does GCC target any of those in its standard build? Oh. Wait. It doesn’t. It builds for only one architecture at a time and if you want anything else you’ll need to recompile the compiler.
LLVM is even intended to be optional in future, and the Zig team is well on their way to making that a reality with the work on stage2.
What backend would you suggest for embedded support?
Zig is 6 years old, and years-old issues exist in their task tracker requesting support for some of these targets.
You _cannot_ simply recompile LLVM to support the targets I listed without using unsupported, risky patches from community sources; if any such patches exist. The multiple architecture support in one binary is a pointless feature when installing multiple GCC builds only takes a tiny, insignificant fraction of my development machine's disk space. Never in my life have I thought "Wow, I'd really speed up development if GCC was one enormous binary holding all possible targets."
Zig's best path forward is to support targeting C as a first tier target; which they seem to be interested in doing.