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This is just like Zig's C compiler

• generichuman 4y ago
  Zig doesn't have a C compiler yet, it bundles clang. Someone in the community was working towards a C compiler in Zig though. ImportC is basically a C frontend for the D compiler, semantics are close enough but there are some changes to be made still.
  • csande17 4y ago
    Zig does have "translate-c", which attempts to convert C code to Zig code. Similarly to D, it's used for a feature to automatically import C headers into a Zig program. But even that's based on libclang's parser and AST.
    • p0nce 4y ago
      ImportC has bitfields and #pragma pack but not translate-c.
  • flohofwoe 4y ago
    The important part in Zig is that you don't need another compiler toolchain to build a mixed C/C++/ObjC project, how that's implemented under the hood (e.g. embedded clang vs self-made compiler) is an implementation detail. I'd argue that C++ and ObjC support is just as important as C support for real world projects (because a lot of important libraries are written in C++ unfortunately, and ObjC is needed for calling into macOS system APIs - although this could also be done more awkwardly by going through the ObjC C runtime). The one big downside of embedding Clang and the whole of LLVM is the compiler's executable size (somewhere around 170 MB).