4 ms·

> There is exactly one VM target available to Zig that is both OS-agnostic and subject to LLVM’s state-of-the-art optimization passes, and that is WebAssembly.

> There is exactly one VM target available to Zig that is both OS-agnostic and subject to LLVM’s state-of-the-art optimization passes, and that is WebAssembly. Honestly, sounds like old Java would also fit their requirements. There was a time when multiple languages ran for multi-platform, which is eased nowadays with containers and remote developer environments. So if their main concern is multi-platform, then feels like they want to look at the technologies developed at that time.

kristoff_it 4y ago
> Honestly, sounds like old Java would also fit their requirements. Yes, it would, as would any other VM target. That said WASM is extremely convenient because it's a target that LLVM supports and because writing a VM for it (or something that compiles it to C) is easy. Java from this perspective seems way less convenient, as it would require us first to build a Zig backend for it, and then we would have to implement our own java intrepreter / aot compiler / ... for it.
brundolf 4y ago
From my understanding, the JVM is much more opinionated than webassembly (it has built-in GC, and I've heard it even has a notion of classes and related concepts at the bytecode level). Particularly for a low-level C-like language like Zig, it seems like a pretty bad match.
- deepsun 4y ago
  We're talking about compiler, right? Sorry don't see why classes would be a bad match to compiling Zig code to LLVM representation. As long as we don't do lot of numbers crunching (where Fortran, R, Julia, MatLab shine), then structs/classes are ok.
  - brundolf 4y ago
    > We're talking about compiler, right? Yes, and Zig's compiler is now written in Zig Zig operates at a low level where it cares about things like manual memory-management. Compiling it to target the JVM instead of webassembly (assuming that's what you're suggesting) would be a really rough abstraction, because the JVM is higher-level. Webassembly is designed to accommodate lower-level languages adjacent to C that manage their own memory, etc And that's not even mentioning the fact that (it sounds like) Zig's compiler already has an LLVM back-end, which means they get wasm support "for free"

kristoff_it 4y ago

> Honestly, sounds like old Java would also fit their requirements. Yes, it would, as would any other VM target. That said WASM is extremely convenient because it's a target that LLVM supports and because writing a VM for it (or something that compiles it to C) is easy. Java from this perspective seems way less convenient, as it would require us first to build a Zig backend for it, and then we would have to implement our own java intrepreter / aot compiler / ... for it.

brundolf 4y ago

From my understanding, the JVM is much more opinionated than webassembly (it has built-in GC, and I've heard it even has a notion of classes and related concepts at the bytecode level). Particularly for a low-level C-like language like Zig, it seems like a pretty bad match.

deepsun 4y ago
We're talking about compiler, right? Sorry don't see why classes would be a bad match to compiling Zig code to LLVM representation. As long as we don't do lot of numbers crunching (where Fortran, R, Julia, MatLab shine), then structs/classes are ok.
- brundolf 4y ago
  > We're talking about compiler, right? Yes, and Zig's compiler is now written in Zig Zig operates at a low level where it cares about things like manual memory-management. Compiling it to target the JVM instead of webassembly (assuming that's what you're suggesting) would be a really rough abstraction, because the JVM is higher-level. Webassembly is designed to accommodate lower-level languages adjacent to C that manage their own memory, etc And that's not even mentioning the fact that (it sounds like) Zig's compiler already has an LLVM back-end, which means they get wasm support "for free"