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Comment by Retro_Dev | Hacker News Reader

As far as I know, Zig has a bunch of things in the works for a better development experience. Almost every day there's something being worked on - like https://github.com/ziglang/zig/pull/24124 just now. I know that Zig had some plans in the past to also work on hot code swapping. At this rate of development, I wouldn't be surprised if hot code swapping was functional within a year on x86_64.

The biggest pain point I personally have with Zig right now is the speed of `comptime` - The compiler has a lot of work to do here, and running a brainF** DSL at compile-time is pretty slow (speaking from experience - it was a really funny experiment). Will we have improvements to this section of the compiler any time soon?

Overall I'm really hyped for these new backends that Zig is introducing. Can't wait to make my own URCL (https://github.com/ModPunchtree/URCL) backend for Zig. ;)

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For comptime perf improvements, I know what needs to be done - I even started working on a branch a long time ago. Unfortunately, it is going to require reworking a lot of the semantic analysis code. Something that absolutely can, should, and will be done, but is competing with other priorities.

Have you considered hiring people to help you with these tasks so you can work in parallel and get more done quicker?

It's a funny question because, as far as I'm aware, Zig Software Foundation is the only organization among its peers that spends the bulk of its revenue directly paying contributors for their time - something I'm quite proud of.

Oh so then you're already doing that. Well then that's fine, the tasks will get done when they get done then.

>>spends the bulk of its revenue directly paying contributors

Same with the FreeBSD Foundation (P: OS Improvements):

https://freebsdfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Bud...

FWIW here's what that looks like for Zig: https://ziglang.org/news/2024-financials/

Super happy about those two :)

Other Foundations are more like the "Penguin Foundation".....

Thank you for working so hard on Zig. Really looking forward to Zig 1.0 taking the system programming language throne.

I am not sure, but why can't C,Rust and Zig with others (like Ada,Odin etc.) and of course C++ (how did I forget it?) just coexist.

Not sure why but I was definitely getting some game of thrones vibes from your comment and I would love to see some competition but I don't know, Just code in whatever is productive to you while being systems programming language I guess.

But I don't know low level languages so please, take my words at 2 cents.

I am just watching the Game of Throne series right now, so this comment sounds funnier than it should to me :D.

The fight for the Iron Throne, lots of self-proclaimed kings trying to take it... C is like King Joffrey, Rust is maybe Robb Stark?! And Zig... probably princess Daenerys with her dragons.

The industry has the resources to sustain maybe two and a half proper IDEs with debuggers, profilers etc.. So much as we might wish otherwise, language popularity matters. The likes of LSP mitigate this to a certain extent, but at the moment they only go so far.

All system programming languages mentioned by GP share the same set of debuggers and profilers, though. It's not very language specific.

That's where extensible IDEs like VSCode (and with it the Language Server Protocol and Debug Adapter Protocol) come in.

It's not perfect yet, but I can do C/C++/ObjC, Zig, Odin, C3, Nim, Rust, JS/TS, Python, etc... development and debugging all in the same IDE, and even within the same project.

For Virgil I went through three different compile-time interpreters. The first walked a tree-like IR that predated SSA. Then, after SSA, I designed a linked-list-like representation specifically for interpretation speed. After dozens of little discrepancies between this custom interpreter and compile output, I finally got rid of it and wrote an interpreter that works directly on the SSA intermediate representation. In the worst case, the SSA interpreter is only 2X slower than the custom interpreter. In the best case, it's faster, and saves a translation step. I feel it is worth it because of the maintenance burden and bugs.

Hot code swapping will be huge for gamedev. The idea that Zig will basically support it by default with a compiler flag is wild. Try doing that, clang.

Totally agree with that - although even right now zig is excellent for gamedev, considering it's performant, uses LLVM (in release modes), can compile REALLY FAST (in debug mode), it has near-seamless C integration, and the language itself is really pleasant to use (my opinion).

Is Zig actually being used for real game dev already?

here's one: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2156410/Konkan_Coast_Pira...

Why more games aren’t being developed in lisp is… perhaps not beyond me, but game development missed a turn a couple times.

That is basically what they do when using Lua, Python, C#, Java, but with less parenthesis, which apparently are too scary for some folks, moving from print(x) to (print x).

There was a famous game with Lisp scripting, Abuse, and Naughty Dog used to have Game Oriented Assembly Lisp.

I had exactly the same title in mind, remember my very young self being in shock when I learned that it was lisp. If you didn't look under the hood you'd never be able to tell, it just worked.

Visual C++ and tools like Live++ have been doing it for years.

Maybe people should occasionally move away from their UNIX and vi ways.

>Maybe people should occasionally move away from their UNIX and vi ways.

Maybe when something better comes up, but since you never invested one single minute on improving Inferno we have to wait for another Hero ;)

Yes, at a huge cost. That only works on Microsoft platforms.

MSVC++ is a nice compiler, sure, but it's not GCC or Clang. It's very easy to have a great feature set when you purposefully cut down your features to the bare minimum. It's like a high-end restaurant. The menu is concise and small and high quality, but what if I'm allergic to shellfish?

GCC and Clang have completely different goals, and they're much more ambitious. The upside of that is that they work on a lot of different platforms. The downside is that the quality of features may be lower, or some features may be missing.

I ended up switching from Zig to C# for a tiny game project because C# already supports cross-platform hot reload by default. (It’s just `dotnet watch`.) Coupled with cross-compilation, AOT compilation and pretty good C interop, C# has been great so far.

Is comptime slowness really an issue? I'm building a JSON-RPC library and heavily relying on comptime to be able to dispatch a JSON request to arbitrary function. Due to strict static typing, there's no way to dynamically dispatch to a function with arbitrary parameters in runtime. The only way I found was figuring the function type mapping during compile time using comptime. I'm sure it will blow up the code size with additional copies of the comptimed code with each arbitrary function.

Yes, last time I checked, Zig's comptime was 20x slower than interpreted Python. Parsing a non-trivial JSON file at comptime is excrutiatingly slow and can take minutes.

Relevant: https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/4055#issuecomment-1646...

ouch, that perf numbers do hurt

> Parsing a non-trivial JSON file at comptime is excrutiatingly slow

Nevertheless, impressive that you can do so!

I would argue that it's not meaningful to do so for larger files with comptime as there doesn't seem to be a need for parsing JSON like the target platform would (comptime emulates it) - I expect it to be independent. You're also not supposed to do I/O using comptime, and @embedFile kind of falls under that. I suppose it would be better to write a build.zig for this particularly use case, which I think would then also be able to run fast native code?

Is it easy to build out a custom backend? I haven't looked at it yet but I'd like to try some experiments with that -- to be specific, I think that I can build out a backend that will consume AIR and produce a memory safety report. (it would identify if you're using undefined values, stack pointer escape, use after free, double free, alias xor mut)

URCL is sending me down a rabbithole. Haven't looked super deeply yet, but the most hilarious timeline would be that an IR built for Minecraft becomes a viable compilation target for languages.

Better spend the time at comptime than at runtime. Always a benefit

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