[bsder]

> But I also accept that that choice means there's an upper limit to how fast my compiler will.

Don't buy it.

A decent OCaml version of a C or Zig compiler would almost certainly not be 10x slower. And it would be significantly easier to parallelize without introducing bugs so it might even be quite a bit faster on big codebases.

Actually designing your programming language to be processed quickly (can definitively figure things out with local parsing, minimizing the number of files that need to be touched, etc.) is WAY more important than the low-level implementation for overall compilation speed.

And I suspect that the author would have gotten a lot further had he been using a GC language and not had to deal with all the low-level issues and debugging.

I like Zig, and I use it a lot. But it is NOT my general purpose language. I'm definitely going to reach for Python first unless I absolutely know that I'm going to be doing systems programming. Python (or anything garbage collected with solid libraries) simply is way more productive on short time scales for small codebases.

[baranul]

> I suspect that the author would have gotten a lot further had he been using a GC language and not had to deal with all the low-level issues

Agree, that many people are using languages out of context to what they are actually trying to do. In many cases, using a GC language would be far more productive for them. Though I do think we should distinguish between compiled and interpreted GC languages, as often there is a significant gap in performance, that can be wanted or appreciated.

[bsder]

> Though I do think we should distinguish between compiled and interpreted GC languages, as often there is a significant gap in performance, that can be wanted or appreciated.

Sure, that is tautologically true.

However, I maintain that the original author would have gotten much further even with a pathologically slow Python implementation. In particular, munging all the low-level stuff like linking is going to have full-on libraries that you could pass off the task to. You can then come back and do it yourself later.

For me, reaching a point that helps reinforce my motivation is BY FAR the most relevant consideration for projects. Given the original article, it seems like I'm not alone.