While a quick compile cycle is beneficial for productivity, this is only the case if it also includes fast tests
Thus wouldn't it be easier to just interpret zig for debug? That would also solve the issue of having to repeat the work for each target
The whole point of debug mode is debuggability, and hooking up such an interpreted Zig to a standard debugger like gbd or lldb probably isn't trivial, since those expect an executable with DWARF debug info.
PS: also acceptable debug-mode performance is actually very important, especially in areas like game development.
There is no real need to add an interpreter. Having custom backend s means that while currently it is being used for debug, far in future it might be able to compete with llvm for speed.
Adding an interpreter would be useless as u would still need to write a custom backend.
The problem is llvms slowness for debug and release.