[titzer]

Zig has some interesting ideas, and I thought the article was going to be more on the low-level optimizations, but it turned out to be "comptime and whole program compilation are great". And I agree. Virgil has had the full language available at compile time, plus whole program compilation since 2006. But Virgil doesn't target LLVM, so speed comparisons end up being a comparison between two compiler backends.

Virgil leans heavily into the reachability and specialization optimizations that are made possible by the compilation model. For example it will aggressively devirtualize method calls, remove unreachable fields/objects, constant-promote through fields and heap objects, and completely monomorphize polymorphic code.