8 ms·

Interesting language. I do find the statements a bit ‘absolute’, eg higher performance than C. In terms of what? Floating point, concurrent processing, ...?

mschwaig 8y ago
In their phylosophy C and zig both aim to do very little behind the scenes beyond what you explicitly express in your code. On a technical level Zig re-uses fancy C compiler infrastructure in the form of LLVM. So that gets them pretty close. The advantage tha zig has over C is that it gets designed decades later when we have learned so much about what is good or bad or fast or slow about C.
- hestefisk 8y ago
  The same could be said for Go. And it still doesn’t explain the statement on performance. I see nothing close to objective benchmarks. I think the language is interesting though and hope this will be published.
nine_k 8y ago
C's simplicity leads to fewer guarantees, this makes some optimizations impossible. E.g. Fortran used to be faster than C in numerical code, because the guarantee of no aliasing allows for more aggressive optimizations. Maybe Zig has something in this department, too.
- AndyKelley 8y ago
  Cross posting from https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/bjwhm5/introduction_the_zig_programming_language/emc30to/ https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/bjwhm5/introdu... Parameters can have `noalias` on them. This is [currently undocumented](https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/1521 https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/1521) and [not yet safety checked](https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/476 https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/476) and there is an [open area of research considering doing it the opposite way](https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/1108 https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/1108). Provided that it could be safety-checked, opt-in aliasing has the potential to make Zig even faster. As far as I'm aware, this is currently the only way in which Rust could potentially outperform Zig (and C).
- flukus 8y ago
  > C's simplicity leads to fewer guarantees, this makes some optimizations impossible. I know that's the theory, but with few exceptions this doesn't seem to have panned out in reality anywhere and C is usually still the gold standard when it come to performance. How many more decades until we get these sufficiently smart compilers?

mschwaig 8y ago

In their phylosophy C and zig both aim to do very little behind the scenes beyond what you explicitly express in your code. On a technical level Zig re-uses fancy C compiler infrastructure in the form of LLVM. So that gets them pretty close. The advantage tha zig has over C is that it gets designed decades later when we have learned so much about what is good or bad or fast or slow about C.

hestefisk 8y ago
The same could be said for Go. And it still doesn’t explain the statement on performance. I see nothing close to objective benchmarks. I think the language is interesting though and hope this will be published.

nine_k 8y ago

C's simplicity leads to fewer guarantees, this makes some optimizations impossible. E.g. Fortran used to be faster than C in numerical code, because the guarantee of no aliasing allows for more aggressive optimizations. Maybe Zig has something in this department, too.

AndyKelley 8y ago
Cross posting from https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/bjwhm5/introduction_the_zig_programming_language/emc30to/ https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/bjwhm5/introdu... Parameters can have `noalias` on them. This is [currently undocumented](https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/1521 https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/1521) and [not yet safety checked](https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/476 https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/476) and there is an [open area of research considering doing it the opposite way](https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/1108 https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/1108). Provided that it could be safety-checked, opt-in aliasing has the potential to make Zig even faster. As far as I'm aware, this is currently the only way in which Rust could potentially outperform Zig (and C).
flukus 8y ago
> C's simplicity leads to fewer guarantees, this makes some optimizations impossible. I know that's the theory, but with few exceptions this doesn't seem to have panned out in reality anywhere and C is usually still the gold standard when it come to performance. How many more decades until we get these sufficiently smart compilers?