vox VS zig

I chase the same goal with Vox, although it is written in D.

Just somewhere to point me, because while I do understand SSA a bit though I can't seem to make progress learning about it (dont know where from). I found https://github.com/MrSmith33/vox/blob/master/internals.md which kinda feeds me information but probably not enough.

Looking for contributors to Vox programming language/compiler: Statically typed, compiled and embeddable language, primarily focused on gamedev. It uses custom backend to keep low compile-times and small size. Written in D language.

https://github.com/MrSmith33/vox

Because it is easier to have a free-list in a dedicated array arena, so you could reuse memory when you free it (and you need to grow arrays when you fill them). I was lazy and did 13 array arenas each dedicated to allocating fixed size chunks, from 16 bytes to 64k bytes. Bigger sizes currently go to malloc/free. And I restrict arrays to PoT sizes, so they only request PoT sized chunks from array arenas.

I use this approach in Vox compiler. Everything is stored in arenas including AST nodes and IR. I'm in the process of documenting the design, but I added a bit of description on memory management and IR storage

Tip: Should probably use the Github permalink https://github.com/MrSmith33/vox/blob/35ec440d0c9a475cd4add6093d122cd249b03be9/source/be/reg_alloc/linear_scan.d#L891-L918 so later readers do not go to some random line after you change that file :)

Here is a CI build

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