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The creators of Zig did something interesting to make it independent of a particular ISA: Use WebAssembly as an intermediate language form. (For bootstrapping o
by Dwedit 4y ago
The creators of Zig did something interesting to make it independent of a particular ISA: Use WebAssembly as an intermediate language form. (For bootstrapping of the compiler itself only)
But it's not just that, it's the use of an intermediate language in general. When you use an intermediate language, you are less tied to one specific architecture, and are instead tied to the existence of a JIT, Recompiler, or Interpreter for that intermediate language being available on the target architecture.
- puffoflogic 4y agoWhat does this comment have to do with the article? And what does it have to do with Zig? ILs are standard for all compiled languages; they are taught in compilers 101.
- Dwedit 4y agoPoint #2 in the article is all about having your code become too dependent on a particular architecture that was popular at the time, but later goes out of favor. This has to do with shipping an executable in native code vs shipping something that isn't directly executable, because it's in an intermediate language instead of native code.