Zig SHOWTIME
1 HN recommender · recommended in 4 months, 2024–2025
1:00:23 · 66K views · Jan 26, 2024
Andrew Kelley's 2024 Zig roadmap talk, followed by a Q&A, covers the language's priorities and the state of the project. Topics include compilation speed, moving off LLVM toward a self-hosted toolchain, async, and the path to 1.0.
HN points to it as the authoritative source on Zig's direction, especially why async was removed and why the toolchain is changing.
4 comments from Hacker News
Check out the Q&A in this video to hear it from the man himself, it's the first question: this video The tl;dr is: "The previous async approach ended up not working, and had to be removed. It's currently an incredibly hard problem with no clear rodemap. The plan is to get there eventually."
Well, if your compilations turn to be submilisecond it's not an implementation detail :) *. As of now it is only supported for x86_64 Linux (only ELF format) and it has some bugs; incremental compilation is in its very early stages. Andrew talked about it in the 2024 roadmap video[1] why they are digging so low on the multiplatform toolchain (for besides incremental compilation): - Fast build times (closely related to IC, but LLVM gives very slow development iterations, even for the compiler development) - Language innovations: besides IC, async/await is a feature Andrew determined to not be feasable to implement with LLVM's coroutines. Async will likely not make it into 1.0, as noted in the 0.13 release notes. It is not discarted yet but neither is it the priority. - There are architectures that don't work very well on LLVM: SPARC and RISC-V are the ones I remember My personal point is that a language that is meant to compete with C cannot have a hard dependency on a C++ project. That, and that it's appealing to have an alternative to LLVM whenever you want to do some JIT but don't want to bring a heavy dependency [1] this video * There is also the `--watch` flag for `zig build` which re-runs every step (IC helps) everytime a file is saved. [edit: formatting]*
Unfortunately I think this is not the case -- it might just be that the async/await issue is getting pushed into the next milestone tag with each release. In the most recent roadmap video[1] Andrew said that the main focus right now is compilation speed, and that async/await specifically was going to take a long time. My memory is that he says something about how it doesn't work well with LLVM and is generally a hard problem that they would prefer to do correctly instead of quickly. [1]: this video
Zig has a pretty well documented 1.0 goals. It was the first thing I heard about zig from Andrew about. this video