| Thanks for the detailed reply. > You can find more details on this at https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/13265. Thanks for the link, my thoughts mirror those of certik in the thread, which Andrew answered well. > at the very least, we can get our self-hosted codegen backends to a point where they perform relatively well in Debug mode without sacrificing debuggability Perhaps a useful point of comparison: the lightweight qbe C compiler achieved compile times of around a quarter that of GCC and Clang, with the generated code taking very roughly 170% as long to execute as the code from GCC or Clang. qbe has roughly 0.1% the lines of code as those 'big' compilers. [0] This should presumably be possible for Zig too, and could be a big win for Zig developers. Closing the performance gap with LLVM though would presumably be extremely challenging and, respectfully, I can't see the Zig project achieving this. Compiler optimisation seems to be a game of diminishing returns. Even if this were achieved, optimised compilation would surely be much slower than unoptimised. [0] https://archive.fosdem.org/2022/schedule/event/lg_qbe/attach... (Relevant discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11555527 ) |