Comment by blindseer
2 years ago
One of the main reasons Zig was interesting to me was the fact that I could drop it in as an alternative to a C/C++ compiler. On Windows, my friends have mentioned how it is easier to install Zig as a C/C++ compiler than any other alternative.
If this proposal is accepted, I personally think Zig will drop to the popularity level of Hare or other extremely niche languages. Getting my colleagues to even try Zig out required me sending them articles about how Uber was using it in production. There is no way my colleagues would even have given it a second thought if it didn't have immediate value to their existing projects.
But I get where the proposal is coming from. LLVM compile times can seem awful, and there's lots of neat optimization tricks you could implement with your own byte code. And dealing with bugs in LLVM is basically a no-go, I've seen this happen in the Julia ecosystem as well.
If my recommendations are worth anything, I think Zig should
1. Use a custom bytecode for debug builds - fast build times, fast debug times etc 2. Use LLVM for release builds - fast runtime performance, slow release performance
If they can manage 1.) while still maintaining support for cross compiling C/C++ (just pass that part off to LLVM?) I think that might be the best of all worlds, with the tradeoff that there's additional backend code to maintain.
> And dealing with bugs in LLVM is basically a no-go, I've seen this happen in the Julia ecosystem as well.
As one of the folks dealing with LLVM bugs in the Julia ecosystem.
Yes it requires a distinct skillet different from working on the higher-level Julia compiler and yes it can sometimes take ages to merge bugfixes upstream, but we actually have a rather good and productive relationship with upstream and the project would get a lot less done if we decided to get rid of LLVM.
In particular GPU support and HPC support (hello PPC) depends on it.
But this is also why we maintain the stance that people need to build Julia against our patchset/fork and will not invest time in bugs filled against Julia builds that didn't use those patches. This happens in particular with distro builds.