Zig SHOWTIME
1 HN recommender · recommended in 3 months, 2022–2023
43:20 · 77K views · Apr 16, 2022
Andrew Kelley's roadmap talk on upcoming Zig compiler milestones, focused on compilation speed. It was given at a Zig community event in 2022.
Shared as the place to see where the Zig project is heading, especially on compiler performance.
3 comments from Hacker News
> To write a fast compiler, it has to be fast from the start. The focus on compilation speed is one of the reasons I'm so interested in Zig. The compiler uses an interesting data-oriented design to represent the AST nodes, etc. You can read about it here: - [LINK] - [LINK] The creator of Zig also has a talk from Handmade Seattle talking about some of the performance gains they've had using these techniques: - [LINK] And a talk "Zig 2023 Roadmap" that is basically all about compilation speed: - this video
Hello HN! Here is some context to decorate this announcement: The Zig self-hosted compiler codebase consists of 197,549 lines of code. There are several different backends, each at varying levels of completion. Here is how many behavior tests are passing: LLVM: 1101/1138 (97%) WASM: 919/1138 (81%) C: 740/1138 (65%) x86_64: 725/1138 (64%) arm: 490/1138 (43%) aarch64: 411/1138 (36%) As you might guess, the one that this milestone is celebrating is the LLVM backend, which is now able to compile the compiler itself, despite 3% of the behavior tests not yet passing. The new compiler codebase, which is written in Zig instead of C++, uses significantly less memory, and represents a modest performance improvement. There are 5 more upcoming compiler milestones which will have a more significant impact on compilation speed. I talked about this in detail last weekend at the Zig meetup in Milan, Italy[1]. There are 3 main things needed before we can ship this new compiler to everyone. 1. bug fixes 2. improved compile errors 3. implement the remaining runtime safety checks If you're looking forward to giving it a spin, subscribe to [this issue]( [LINK] ) to be notified when it is landed in master branch. Edit: The talk recording about upcoming compiler milestones is uploaded now [1] [1]: this video
The worst part is that it's not done yet :^) This means that you will not find super complete introductory materials about every aspect of programming with Zig. The language reference is very good but for example the standard library doesn't have docs yet as we're still working on the autodoc tool. On the other hand reading the stdlib source code is very easy in good part thanks to the reasons you already mentioned in your post. [LINK] You might also be interested in reading about the project to see if you like where we're going (aside from technical details of the language). [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] this video You can find links to learning materials in the "learn" section of the official website: [LINK] Last but not least, at the moment we compensate the lack of learning materials by having a community that it's very good at helping newcomers, so make sure you join one of the communities.