miniPerl VS zig

Using "mini" to mean a subset of the language rather than a version for small systems has precedent. For example in the Perl community, miniperl is a subset of Perl. It's mostly used to bootstrap builds of the full language, but in theory can be used separately as a restricted programming language. It's also the name of a module, ExtUtils::Miniperl, for Perl (https://metacpan.org/pod/ExtUtils::Miniperl) that builds miniperlmain.c and perlmain.c files to bootstrap the compilation of the language system. This is not to be confused with the Raku project on Github called "miniPerl" (https://github.com/grondilu/miniPerl) which compiles subsets of Perl via the Lambda calculus to JavaScript output.

I'd personally pretty much always expect "mini" or "r" (as in "rperl", a restricted subset of Perl with C++ connections) versions of a language to be restricted subsets for some purpose (rperl's is to give away flexibility for performance while maintaining a good portion of the original language).

I've seen an "e" or "emb" prefix or a "small", "tiny", "micro" or "µ" (or "u") prefix to mean a small toolchain version several places, like SmallC or uclibc or Mikroe's mikroC. It wouldn't surprise me to see a "nano" version of a language tool either. Sometimes these are subsets as well, but to fit the size constraints of the target rather than for constraining the input for its own sake.

There is an issue proposing this approach: https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/4284

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