mach VS arocc

Compare mach vs arocc and see what are their differences.

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mach arocc
38 12
3,707 1,246
6.6% 7.5%
9.7 9.4
10 days ago 8 days ago
Zig Zig
GNU General Public License v3.0 or later MIT License
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

mach

Posts with mentions or reviews of mach. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-11-05.
  • Show HN: Lyceum – An MMO game built with Zig and Erlang
    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 5 Nov 2024
    Did you happen to tinker with https://machengine.org/ it's a Zig game engine & graphics toolkit?
  • Leveraging Zig's Allocators
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 15 Jun 2024
    We're working on a game engine in Zig[0]

    If you're looking for interesting Zig codebases to read, you might be interested in our low-level audio input/output library[1] or our module system[2] codebase - the latter includes an entity component system and uses Zig's comptime to a great degree to enable some interesting flexibility (dependency injection, global view of the world, etc.) while maintaining a great amount of type safety in an otherwise dynamic system.

    [0] https://machengine.org/

    [1] https://github.com/hexops/mach/tree/main/src/sysaudio

    [2] https://github.com/hexops/mach/tree/main/src/module

  • Zig Software Foundation 2024 Financial Report and Fundraiser
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 18 Jan 2024
    Myself and many others are betting on Zig in major ways, I truly think it has a bright future ahead.

    In spare time, myself and a few others are working on a game engine in Zig[0], and the Zig core team has been very receptive to addressing issues our project faces and supporting us.

    Others are working on pixel art editors[1], open source 2D RPG games[2], there's a group of independent folks working on a 3D massive immersive sim game[3], a group working on making Zig an amazing language for micro-controllers[4], etc.

    Please consider donating $5-10 a month to the ZSF! They are a great group of people, and it has so many knock-on effects for others in the FOSS community. :)

    [0] https://machengine.org/

    [1] https://github.com/foxnne/pixi

    [2] https://github.com/foxnne/aftersun

    [3] https://github.com/Srekel/tides-of-revival

    [4] https://github.com/ZigEmbeddedGroup

  • DevDocs
    19 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 12 Jan 2024
    I don't know if there's anything better than a zip. For our website[0] which includes a bunch of docs for our game engine, Zig packages, etc. we just offer a link "offline version of this site" in the footer which is an ~80MB zip file.

    I think the challenge with zip files is.. do you want all the images? do you want all versions of the docs, or just a specific version of the docs? It's hard to tailor the zip to the user's desire. But zip still seems to be the best.

    [0] https://machengine.org/

  • Not only Unity...
    53 projects | /r/opensourcegames | 11 Nov 2023
  • Mach - Zig game engine & graphics toolkit
    1 project | /r/Zig | 12 Sep 2023
  • New Béziers from Math
    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 10 Sep 2023
  • 0.11.0 Release Notes
    12 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 3 Aug 2023
    A game engine https://machengine.org is being written in zig, there's also https://microzig.tech as zig is well suited to embedded development.
  • Significant examples of Zig software (June 2023)?
    7 projects | /r/Zig | 6 Jun 2023
    https://github.com/hexops/mach (shameless plug)
  • Learn WebGPU
    9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 27 Apr 2023
    Zig fits pretty naturally here too. We've got ~19 WebGPU examples[1] which use Dawn natively (no browser support yet), and we build it using Zig's build system so it 'just works' out of the box with zero fuss as long as you grab a recent Zig version[2]. No messing with cmake/ninja/depot_tools/etc.

    WASM support in Zig, Rust, and C++ is also not equal. C++ prefers Emscripten which reimplements parts of popular libraries like SDL, for me personally that feels a bit weird as I don't want my compiler implementing my libraries / changing how they behave. Rust I believe generally avoids emscripten(?), but Zig for sure lets me target WASM natively and compile C/C++ code to it using the LLVM backend and soon the custom Zig compiler backend.

    [1] https://github.com/hexops/mach-examples

    [2] https://github.com/hexops/mach#supported-zig-version

arocc

Posts with mentions or reviews of arocc. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-07-20.
  • 21 Algol 60 Compilers in 1962
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 7 Dec 2024
    Currently, zig cc is the Clang frontend which is linked into the Zig compiler (most things in that blog post are about differences between the Zig toolchain and a typical Clang toolchain, and how Zig invokes Clang.

    I'm not sure what the current plan is for C compilation after the LLVM divorce and when Clang is moved into a Zig package (e.g. I remember talk that arocc [1] is becoming the new Zig C frontend, but not sure if that's still planned, or if C compilation will be delegated to the new Clang package along with C++ and ObjC compilation).

    [1] https://github.com/Vexu/arocc

  • Aro – Zig's new C compiler
    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 20 Jul 2024
  • no more bit fiddling (and introducing bilge)
    4 projects | /r/rust | 15 May 2023
    Possible reference as it requires to use the compiler as part of language abi: https://github.com/Vexu/arocc/issues/178 Not sure, where a better thread with explanations of the flaws is.
  • Zig Build System
    8 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 14 Apr 2023
    Zig calls clang to compile C code. This doesn't add a new dependency since Zig already depends on LLVM. In the future when Zig doesn't depend as much on LLVM, there might be a reason to use a C compiler written in Zig (e.g. https://github.com/Vexu/arocc)
  • Embedded C Coding Standard
    1 project | /r/C_Programming | 22 Jun 2022
    Bit field rules are underspecified or plain wrongly implemented, because in their edge cases clang and GCC differ in semantics. See https://github.com/Vexu/arocc/issues/178 This should be further restricted with static asserts as compiler semantics even changed with versions and doing this manually/doing code review is error prone.
  • How much better is Zig's "no-FFI" C interop compared to FFIs in other languages?
    1 project | /r/Zig | 5 Jun 2022
    You might want to contribute or look into https://github.com/Vexu/arocc, which is planned to be eventually an alternative frontend. Is arocc able to handle your use cases?
  • Aro: A C compiler written in Zig
    1 project | /r/hackernews | 5 Feb 2022
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 4 Feb 2022
  • Zig 0.9.0
    12 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 20 Dec 2021
    > Does this mean that y'all are open to the self-hosted compiler supporting CPU architectures unlikely to ever have LLVM support?

    Yes! We won't block 1.0 on the quality of the less mainstream targets, but that's what the tier system is for - to ship a compiler that has varying levels of quality for various targets, while communicating clearly to users what kind of experience they can expect for each one.

    SuperH patches are absolutely welcome.

    > how is zig cc anticipated to work with a self-hosted Zig? Will there be a dependency on clang [...]?

    The main distribution of Zig will be LLVM/Clang-enabled. However it is already possible to build a version of Zig that does not have these features enabled. In such case, compiling C, C++, and Objective-C code will result in an error.

    However, the arocc project[1] is emerging, which, depending on a combination of how much funding ZSF gets and how much enthusiasm the unpaid contributors working in their spare time have, is looking like a promising C frontend that would be available even without LLVM/Clang. It is C only, however, with no intention of compiling C++ or Objective-C.

    > would zig cc support the planned C backend?

    As it is currently implemented: no. Zig invokes clang to turn C source code into object files.

    However, with the arocc frontend above, this would be converting the C source code into ZIR (or perhaps AIR), which could then be lowered with any of the backends, including the (partially complete) C backend. In such case, the C output would look drastically different than the input. It would look more like an IR than natural C code that a human would write.

    [1]: https://github.com/Vexu/arocc

  • [Rust advocates] demean software that's not memory safe the way that politicians use their words to sow anger. C has won, and Rust blew it's shot aiming at C++ instead.
    2 projects | /r/programmingcirclejerk | 20 Sep 2021
    Implementing only the language part takes like 10k LOC.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing mach and arocc you can also consider the following projects:

quickjs-emscripten - Safely execute untrusted Javascript in your Javascript, and execute synchronous code that uses async functions

ziglyph - Unicode text processing for the Zig programming language.

SDL.zig - A shallow wrapper around SDL that provides object API and error handling

utfcpp - UTF-8 with C++ in a Portable Way

zig - General-purpose programming language and toolchain for maintaining robust, optimal, and reusable software.

bzflag - 3D multi-player tank battle game

glibc_version_header - Build portable Linux binaries without using an ancient distro

RIIR - why not Rewrite It In Rust

ComLightInterop - Cross-platform COM interop library for .NET Core 2.1 or newer

stage0 - A set of minimal dependency bootstrap binaries

mach-glfw-vulkan-example - mach-glfw Vulkan example

zig-riscv-embedded - Experimental Zig-based CoAP node for the HiFive1 RISC-V board

Nutrient – The #1 PDF SDK Library, trusted by 10K+ developers
Other PDF SDKs promise a lot - then break. Laggy scrolling, poor mobile UX, tons of bugs, and lack of support cost you endless frustrations. Nutrient’s SDK handles billion-page workloads - so you don’t have to debug PDFs. Used by ~1 billion end users in more than 150 different countries.
www.nutrient.io
featured
CodeRabbit: AI Code Reviews for Developers
Revolutionize your code reviews with AI. CodeRabbit offers PR summaries, code walkthroughs, 1-click suggestions, and AST-based analysis. Boost productivity and code quality across all major languages with each PR.
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Did you know that Zig is
the 22nd most popular programming language
based on number of references?