Hacker News Reader

Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

clang also supports cross compiling.

Sometimes I wonder how much people nowadays actually bother to learn about compiled languages.

The Zig compiler bundles the SDKs of supported targets while Clang does not, so you can cross compile out of the box without any extra steps. It also defines targets for various GLIBC versions which AFAICT Clang does not.

It is so hard to install additional OS packages.

Did you actually try it? Across Windows, Linux and macOS? Setting up a vanilla Clang toolchain for cross-compilation is by far not as trivial as you make it sound.

You mean like cross compiling from Windows to Symbian, Windows CE/Pocket PC, Palm, Android, PlayStation, Nintendo, XBox?

It is not a walk in the park, but it hardly a task only worthy of Hercules.

Nobody said it was a task only worthy of Hercules. Just that it is a royal pain, and Zig removes that pain. You asked "why zig?". That's your answer.

And then did you try the same on Linux and macOS? That's what the Zig toolchain gives you, it doesn't lock you into a specific OS.

Yeah, and zig solves that. Instead of installing, trying the right header files, you just untar 70mb and you are good to go.

There is a heck of a lot to be said for making it a painless process. Yes, you can cross compile C and C++. No, it is not at all simple to set up. I've used rust for projects for similar reasons: if I want to cross compile from windows to linux it is ridiculously less painful to compile pure rust than C or C++ (especially if I want to set up a new machine for it).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com