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Comment by maldev | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone know if zigs reached the point of maturity to having solved most compiler bugs? I used it a couple years ago and it failed HORRIBLY for anything real I was throwing at it.

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I’ve been using zig for hobby projects for the last few months and have yet to run into a compiler bug. Tracking down comptime errors can be a little bit confusing, but I’ve found the compiler to be stable and useable.

The switch to the Zig implementation fixed a ton of bugs, but introduced way more new ones. I've used it in anger for almost a year and simply gave up at some point and switched to Rust because of the buggy build-ins and broken compiler error messages.

Tbh I doubt that this situation will improve now that they bit off even more from the compiler cake after having more than they can chew already.

> bit off even more from the compiler cake after

Isn't the idea that bootstrapping the compiler let's people who only know zig contribute to the compiler? Might it be too premature to declare failure?

In theory maybe, but after watching Andrew Kelleys latest talks I don't get the feeling that the Zig implementation is build for readability and correctness, but an experiment for exploring the design space of data-driven-design in compilers.

Would you dispute that there is a material improvement in compilation speed?

Compilation speed is completely irrelevant if your codebase is so complex that you can't get it correct.

  rm -rf src

Extremely fast and arguably safer than a broken compiler.

Sounds like you're just looking for a reason to bitch at zig.

The only thing worse than Zigs immature compiler is the immature community.

You must feel threatened by zig for some reason. Afraid that X language that you've put time in will be a sunk cost?

You can try out V, it's similar, but is very stable for its age: https://vlang.io.

We switched to a self-hosted implementation of the compiler since then. The old compiler had various age-related issues, Cpp-related issues and it made little sense to fix it since the plan was to replace it anyway.

The new compiler is a much better codebase and compiler bugs get fixed much more quickly and effectively.

Maturity to fix most compiler bugs? Yes, on x86_64 (some bugs remain on other architectures). But you can still expect your code to break between zig versions.

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