Comment by MuffinFlavored
2 years ago
They're dropping LLVM by re-implementing everything it does in their own homegrown fashion?...
To what benefit? Isn't this a waste of resources?
2 years ago
They're dropping LLVM by re-implementing everything it does in their own homegrown fashion?...
To what benefit? Isn't this a waste of resources?
LLVM just works well on the front that clang uses, after that, llvm itself is a wild beast full of worms, which is becoming more and more painful to work with if you are a language creator/mantainer, A lot of untested paths, and hidden bugs that zig has hit before... many times.
It will NOT reimplement everything, if you read the proposal, it's in favour of changing the LLVM dependency (the libs) not dropping LLVM IR generation, this will come with performance regression since now will be up to the team to get the correct IR, and making decisions LLVM IR generation does already in LLVM
The problem is that clang is being dropped, which means, unless we have a new C++ front made in zig (a-la AroCC for C) we are gonna suffer quite a bit for projects using C++ with zig.
> unless we have a new C++ front made in zig
Writing a C++ compiler is several order of magnitude more complicated than writing a C, Java, Go or Zig compiler. There's a very good reason there are only 3 in existence despite how ubiquitous C++ is (and even then, it takes years for them to keep up with the latest standards). C++'s grammar is type 0, there's isn't even an EBNF definition of it because it's pratically impossible to write a complete one. Clang only succeeded thanks to massive investments from the biggest players in the industry, and GCC/MSVC simply grew alongside the language. All other C++ compilers died a horrible death a long time ago.
Out of curiosity, does Intel's icc compiler see much use? It looks like it uses LLVM these days, but its frontend presumably still needs to handle all of C++'s complexity.
2 replies →
> unless we have a new C++ front made in zig
that seems a monumental undertaking.
The reasoning seems to be the flood of LLVM bugs, but I don't think reinventing such a large wheel will be any easier.
It sounds like some of those bugs are just related to people using distro compilers?