I really like Zig, but I do think you have to accept some rough edges and breaking changes when using it. Give it another decade and I am hopeful it will be much more stable.
One annoyance that I've ran into when using Zig as a transpiler backend is the lack of unstructured goto. Many languages don't need that, but if you're dealing with the one that does, converting such code is non-trivial.
Eventually, I restructured my IR to allow for more imperative code-generation, which I believe will lead to slightly better optimizations by the compiler.
I'm using it as a cross-compiler for linux-arm64 because its much simpler to download a single archive and extract it somewhere than to waste a bunch of time on guessing how each different Linux distro does ARM64 cross compilers (or doesn't in the case of Fedora).
The more Zig-the-language is hyped, the more I see it doesn't bring anything of interest. Zig-the-toolchain, on the other hand, is neat.
Does anyone know if it’s reasonably easy to use elf2 as a standalone linker in a c/c++ toolchain? Or is it specially built just for Zig?
https://github.com/jacobly0/zig/tree/4508c2543508e04253471e1... https://github.com/jacobly0/zig/blob/4508c2543508e04253471e1...
I might be mistaken, but the brief look at code shows that the speed up appears to come from combination of async architecture (the selling point of Mold) and intelligent usage of PUNCH_HOLE/INSERT_RANGE fallocate() operations.
Surprisingly enough PUNCH_HOLE and friends have already matured to be production ready, with viable support from ext4 and xfs filesystem. The possibilities!
No kidding. There are also https://github.com/davidlattimore/wild and https://github.com/kubkon/bold.
There are other projects that have used it in a similar way too.
[1] https://actually.fyi/posts/zig-makes-rust-cross-compilation-... [2] https://jcbhmr.com/2024/07/19/zig-cc-cmake/
