Can you give an example of a compiler bug you've run into? I feel like they are very rare for most use cases, these days.

I've got a thing for packed structs (network encodings tend to be zealous to use weird bit widths and packings to save a byte on the header) but unfortunately for me they seem to be one of the most troublesome things in the language and every time I return to try them out it seems like there is always more to fix - though I usually get farther and farther in each round. The self-hosted compiler seems to have calmed things with it but there flow of mis compilations still and they tend to hang around for a couple of releases. For a good read of how weird these can be here is a bug report from last month https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/13480

yeah, that makes sense. packed structs are the place where I had trouble in the past.

While you are right about it not being stable, and about packed struct being a bit wonky, I've been using Zig a lot for some hobby projects and rarely run into problems. APIs are in flux of course, but that usually only takes minutes to fix as long as you keep the compiler reasonably up to date. Maybe there's a fix required every month or so, but it seems that most things are settling down. YMMV, I mostly use the basic stuff and sprinkle some comptime here and there.

> packed struct being a bit wonky

That's putting it a bit mildly from what I recall the last time I used them. They work on LE if you don't color too far outside the lines, but otherwise I would describe their state as "almost completely broken".

Field ordering being endian dependent, while historically how things are done with bitfields, seems questionable to me anyways.

Issues with packed structs are finally resolved in 0.10.0:

https://ziglang.org/download/0.10.0/release-notes.html#Packe...