notes

Zig

• I Believe Zig Has Function Colors [HN] - Shows that Zig has two colors of functions, async and not, that are distinguished by calling conventions. The color can usually be statically determined and the correct calling convention assigned, except when used as dynamic function pointers. Concludes that structured concurrency (as in Swift) is better.

• Make self hosted compiler capable of building itself [HN]

• Zig Roadmap 2023

  There are also many bugs that do not exist in self-hosted, that only exist in the C++ implementation, so that will be very nice—especially for everybody who likes to go into crazy town with comptime, you can start to do all your fancy comptime regex stuff with or whatever with this implementation.

  Is there more written on how the self-hosted compiler enables further comptime expressivity?

  The C backend allows the stage1 codebase to be retired.

• Goodbye to the C++ Implementation of Zig [HN]

  The Zig compiler in C++ was removed (80,000 lines), leaving only the self-hosted compiler (250,000 lines). To facilitate the new bootstrapping process, a stage1 compiler build is periodically checked into the repo and a minimal WebAssembly-to-C converter (4,000 lines of C) was added.

  Bootstrapping process before:

  • stage1: Use system C compiler to compile the C++ Zig compiler into zig1.
  • stage2: Use zig1 to compile the self-hosted Zig compiler into zig2.

  Bootstrapping process now:

  • stage1 setup:
    • Use system Zig compiler to compile the self-hosted Zig compiler into zig1.wasm, with only the C backend enabled.
    • Compress it as zig1.wasm.zst and check it into the repo.
  • stage1:
    • Use zig-wasm2c to zstd-decompress and convert zig1.wasm.zst to zig1.c.
    • Use system C compiler to compile zig1.c to zig1. This has incorrect logic (only C backend).
  • stage2:
    • Use zig1 to compile the Zig compiler into zig2.c.
    • Use system C compiler to compile zig2.c to zig2. This has correct logic, but with the optimizations of the C compiler.
  • stage3:
    • Use zig2 to compile the Zig compiler into zig3. This has correct logic and optimizations.
  • stage4:
    • Use zig3 to compile the Zig compiler into zig4. This is binary-wise identical to zig3.

• Zig ported to SerenityOS [talk] [PR] [HN]

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