Zig self hosted compiler is now capable of building itself

Re:Zig self hosted compiler is now capable of building itself by adgjlsfhk1 on Saturday April 16, 2022 @12:06PM (#31053416)

imo, most code can do just fine with GC. modern GCs can be relatively low overhead even with guaranteed small pauses (10ms). furthermore, most code that can't handle pauses can be written to not allocate any memory (so GC can be temporarily turned off). as such, the only two places where you need manual allocation are for OS development, and hard real time requirements.

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Re:Zig self hosted compiler is now capable of building itself by Comevius on Saturday April 16, 2022 @12:29PM (#31053677)

When tail latency (high-percentile latency) is important GC is not a good choice. Wait-free (threads progress independently) concurrent algorithms also need wait-free memory reclamation with bounded memory usage to be able to guarantee progress.

But most software are throughput-oriented.

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Re:Zig self hosted compiler is now capable of building itself by pjmlp on Saturday April 16, 2022 @01:53PM (#31054422)

Additionally, not all GCs are made alike, and languages like D, F#, C#, Nim, Swift, among others, also offer value types and manual memory management, if desired.

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Re:Zig self hosted compiler is now capable of building itself by elcritch on Saturday April 16, 2022 @02:44PM (#31054932)

Also Swift and Nim w/ ARC use reference counting, which generally give much better latency and lower memory overhead. Reference counting is part of the reason iOS devices don’t need as much RAM.

Nim’s ARC system also doesn’t use atomic or locks which means it’s runtime overhead is very low. I use it successfully on embedded devices for microsecond timed events with no large tail latencies.

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Re:Zig self hosted compiler is now capable of building itself by pjmlp on Saturday April 16, 2022 @03:01PM (#31055081)

Reference counting is a GC algorithm.

I wouldn't buy into much Apple marketing regarding its performance though,

https://github.com/ixy-languages/ixy-languages

It makes sense in the context of tracing GC having been a failure in Objective-C due to its C semantics, while automating Cocoa's retain/release calls was much safer approach. Swift naturally built on top of that due to interoperability with Objective-C frameworks.

Nim has taken other optimizations into consideration, however only in the new ORC implementation.

Still, all of them are much better than managing memory manually.

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Re:Zig self hosted compiler is now capable of building itself by elcritch on Saturday April 16, 2022 @03:48PM (#31055500)

> I wouldn't buy into much Apple marketing regarding its performance though,

I wouldn’t make claims on Swifts overall performance, but just it’s memory usage (really Obj-Cs) and particularly for GUI development. Java’s GCs have always been very memory hungry, usually to the tune of 2x. Same with .Net. Though to be fair Go’s and Erlang’s GCs have much better memory footprints. Erlang’s actor model benefits it there.

Agreed, they’re all better than manual memory management.

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Re:Zig self hosted compiler is now capable of building itself by kaba0 on Sunday April 17, 2022 @02:22PM (#31062965)

OSs and hard real time can also be written in managed languages — there are many research OS written in managed languages (with a bit of assembly, but you also need it for C as it is not low-level either), like Midori, and there are even hard-real-time JVMs used in military settings like jamaicavm.

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