Old Zig compiler (in C++) was nuked today

Interesting. Last I recall from working with Zig the plan was to run the self-hosted compiler against itself to produce a C file that would, itself, be the bootstrap compiler. Now it looks like there's an extra step involving a WASM blob and a WASI implementation, and the only explanation I could find is in a 50 minute video with no transcript.

I'm both surprised and, at least as regards my current understanding of the situation, disappointed.

Also, one of my toy Zig projects depends on async[0] functionality not currently available in the self-hosted compiler, so I hope the add that before ditching the current stage1.

[0] I used the suspend/resume primitives to build coroutines, which are significantly simpler and easier to follow than the state machines they replaced in that code.

PS: I did some more digging in the Zig Discord channels and discovered that this is a temporary plan, and that all this WASM/WASI nonsense should ultimately be replaced by a C implementation. Still finding the reasoning for it a bit dubious though.

The bootstrapping story is a little hard to follow here. I think the normal zig compiler has a C backend which was run on itself, the source cleaned up by hand then checked in. Bootstrap then means compiling that generated-then-edited C, with an ongoing obligation to update that C implementation when the language changes.

Does anyone know what the language runtime status is for zig? I think there's a libc involved somewhere. There's a standard library which is probably written in zig, did that also get compiled to C and checked in to support the generated bootstrap compiler?

This post talks about a checked in binary that was compiled from something and will periodically need to be updated. It's unclear whether that allows deletion of the C bootstrap code.

Oh, and there was a C++ implementation as well, which is no more. That does sound like a win.