rustc_codegen_cranelift VS zig

Windows is supported. See https://github.com/rust-lang/rustc_codegen_cranelift/issues/....

> When this happens, it seems like it'll be possible to get the LLVM bits out of the bootstrap process and lead to a fully self-hosted Rust.

What do you mean by "when this happens"? GP's point is that this has already happened: the Cranelift backend is feature-complete from the perspective of the language [0], except for inline assembly and unwinding on panic. It was merged into the upstream compiler in 2020 [1], and a compiler built with only the Cranelift backend is perfectly capable of building another compiler. LLVM hasn't been a necessary component of the Rust compiler for quite some time.

[0] https://github.com/bjorn3/rustc_codegen_cranelift

[1] https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/77975

Note that the Cranelift codegen will eventually become standard for debug builds to speed them up.

Maybe one day we'll have rustc b3 backend like what they did with Cranelift

Additionally, there is gcc codegen for rustc (https://github.com/rust-lang/rustc_codegen_gcc), which is not a compiler per se, but an alternative code generator, with more architectures supported and other nice things. It's also coming along, but there's still a lot of work to do there too. There's also Cranelift codegen (https://github.com/bjorn3/rustc_codegen_cranelift), which is designed to make debug builds faster, but this is not as exciting/useful as the other 2.

For the instant reloading, that's in Sycamore, so you should speak to its devs, but as for the alternative compiler backend, it's not my project, but it uses Cranelift and works pretty well! See https://github.com/bjorn3/rustc_codegen_cranelift for details.

The more immediate goal of "distribute the cranelift backend as a rustup component" has been making good progress and seems like it might happen relatively soon https://github.com/bjorn3/rustc_codegen_cranelift/milestone/...

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

ESP32 and STM32 support is very welcome!

I have been following https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/5467 for a while and progress seemed to have slowed significantly

I have never used it directly, take what I say with a grain of salt.

As far as I know at least part of the idea was to eliminate the function coloring problem by letting the compiler do some nifty compile-time deductions. This had some issues (I don't know if this is still planned, it seems like the kind of thing that should not work in practice). Additionally, there were all sorts of hard technical issues with LLVM, debugging, etc.

I recommend checking the issue tracker, eg. https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/6025

I personally don't understand the domain well enough at all, but honestly, I feel like (if possible) Zig should try to double down on its allocator approach.

Instead of trying to use some compile-time deduction magic explicitly pass around an "async runtime/executor" struct which you explicitly have to interact with. Why not?

Yes, fundamentally. In Rust if you take a parameter of generic type T without any bounds, you cannot call anything on it except for things which are defined for all types. If you specify bounds, only things required by the bounds can be called (+ the ones for all types). Another difference is where you get an error when you try pass something which doesn't adhere to a certain trait. In Rust you will get an error at the call site, not at the place of use (except if you don't specify any bounds).

Zig is doing just fine without any trait mechanism and it simplifies the language a lot but it does come up from time to time. The usual solution is to just get type information via @typeInfo and error out if the type is something you're not expecting [0]. Not everybody is happy about it though [1] because, among other things, it makes it more difficult to discover what the required type actually is.

[0] https://github.com/ziglang/zig/blob/b3aed4e2c8b4d48b8b12f606...

[1] https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/17198