mark-sweep VS zig

Never forget:

https://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2013/12/08/babys-first-ga...

> Let me stress here that while this collector is simple, it isn’t a toy.

> There are a ton of optimizations you can build on top of this—in GCs and programming languages, optimization is 90% of the effort—but the core code here is a legitimate real GC.

> It’s very similar to the collectors that were in Ruby and Lua until recently.

> You can ship production code that uses something exactly like this.

> Now go build something awesome!

Bob Nystrom also has a blog, and his articles are really well written (see his post on Pratt parsers / garbage collectors). I'd also recommend going through the source code for Wren, it shares a lot of code with Lox. Despite the deceptive simplicity of the implementation, it (like Lox) is incredibly fast - it's a great way to learn how to build production grade compilers in general.

Bob Nystrom (of Game Programming Patterns, Crafting Interpreters, and dartfmt fame) also wrote a tutorial[1], of a precise as opposed to a conservative garbage collector.

Regarding register scanning, Andreas Kling has made (or at least quoted) an amusing observation[2] that your C runtime already has a primitive to dump all callee-save registers onto the stack: setjmp(). So all you have to do to scan registers is to put a jmp_buf onto the stack, setjmp() to it, then scan the stack normally starting from its address.

[1] https://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2013/12/08/babys-first-ga...

[2] https://youtu.be/IzB6iTeo8kk

- http://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2013/12/08/babys-first-gar...

Might not be that hard: https://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2013/12/08/babys-first-garbage-collector/

To better understand garbage collection, nothing better than implementation. This article is such a joy to read:

https://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2013/12/08/babys-first-ga...

https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/224

e.g.:

> > When debugging/prototyping, it's useful to comment out a line without having to refactor, e.g.

When writing code in a scripting language, sometimes you need that extra bit of performance (or maybe an async feature from Zig).

NodeJS is by no means a slow runtime, it wouldn’t be so popular if it was. But compared to Bun, it’s slow. Bun was built from the ground up with speed in mind, using both JavascriptCore and Zig. The Bun team spent an enormous amount of time and energy trying to make Bun fast, including lots of profiling, benchmarking, and optimizations.

ntdll.dll!RtlUserThreadStart()

There are valid reasons to use APIs from NTDLL. Where I disagree with zig#1840 is the idea that it is always better to use NTDLL versions of API. Every other software ecosystem uses the standard Win32 APIs and diverging from that without a good reason seems like a good way to have unexpected behavior. One concrete example is most users and programmers expect Windows to redirect some file system paths when running on WOW64. But this is implemented in Kernel32, not ntdll.

https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/11894

Zig also has an IRC channel on libera (#zig) that is moderated by Andrew Kelley.[1]

[1] https://github.com/ziglang/zig/wiki/Community

1. ZIG - $103,611