[audunw]

Did you read the article at all?

Zig itself is an incredibly fast compiler. And the language and standard library is designed to support writing that compilers. And yeah, that’s all about algorithm and data structures. A large part of why struct-of-arrays is easy to do in Zig is because Andrew wanted it for making the compiler fast. The article also points out that it’s reusing code from the Zig compiler source as well.

Roc may not be super fast now, but that doesn’t mean they haven’t seen ahead and set themselves up for success.

Yeah, I agree there is value in self-hosting as you say. Zig itself is an example of that. But zig is a systems language. If Roc isn’t aiming for that nice it might not be the best choice for writing a compiler in. As an example in the other extreme end of language flavours: Python is still mainly CPython and efforts to make a python interpreter in some variant of python hasn’t been particularly successful.