Oh wow I had no idea this was just casually sitting on HN front page while I was streaming live coding of adding this to the Zig compiler! Here's the recording:

Oh wow I had no idea this was just casually sitting on HN front page while I was streaming live coding of adding this to the Zig compiler! Here's the recording: https://vimeo.com/673819867 https://vimeo.com/673819867 I see WalterBright down there in the comments. Hi! His talk at Handmade Seattle about adding a C compiler to D was amusing and informative: https://media.handmade-seattle.com/importc/ https://media.handmade-seattle.com/importc/ Some interesting differences between the two approaches: * D ImportC relies on an external preprocessor, while Aro does preprocessing. * D ImportC lowers to D AST, while Aro lowers Zig AIR. This tweet has an infographic to help you get an idea of where AIR is in the Zig compiler pipeline: https://twitter.com/andy_kelley/status/1457800302946492418 https://twitter.com/andy_kelley/status/1457800302946492418 * D ImportC is shipped, while Aro as a C frontend in Zig is an [unfinished branch](https://github.com/ziglang/zig/pull/10795 https://github.com/ziglang/zig/pull/10795) It's been really exciting watching Vexu and ehaas (and other contributors) working on Aro. Looks like there's some confusion as to why this exists when Zig already uses libclang to compile C code. The main reasons are: * Improved `@cImport`/translate-c functionality, especially with regards to translation of macros. Vexu and ehaas are the main contributors of Zig's C translation implementation. * Ability to bootstrap a lean Zig binary that does not depend on LLVM, and yet is still able to compile C code and use the `@cImport` language feature to translate C code. * Ability to more tightly integrate with Zig's linker, bringing some incremental compilation abilities to C. Due to language limitations it can never be as good as Zig but it can still be improved over other C compilers. * Ability to compile C code to targets that LLVM does not support. Zig plans to support a wider target range than LLVM.