← Back to context

Comment by bpavuk

9 hours ago

not quite! if your project is mixed C/Zig, then editing Zig would work but editing C would not. the Zig compiler caches Zig AIR but no information from C. plus, the C compilation can only really be done with LLVM and writing a self-hosted backend would be PITA for C

5 comments

bpavuk

Reply
dundarious  8 hours ago

Not quite true, there is already a capable C compiler written in Zig (Aro/arocc), and a plan to transition to it for C compilation: https://codeberg.org/ziglang/translate-c

Using this native (written in Zig) C compiler to translate C source into Zig source as a part of the build, would presumably lend itself trivially to all the incremental logic in TFA, as updating C would update the generated Zig, and the incremental logic would detect differences just like it detects differences made by a human in an editor. Maybe there are aspects of the generated Zig that would complicate that somewhat, but I don't know -- just a warning about my ignorance.

This is part of plans to remove the hard LLVM dependency. AFAIK, the LLVM dependency will still be a variant many will use for the convenience of Zig as a much better clang, but removing the hard dependency is part of enabling all these great features like incremental compilation.