Andrew is super sharp so I imagine he and the team will get there now that it's declared as a goal.

But man, it seems to me (uneducated on the challenges zig faces w/LLVM) that this shifts the team's capacity away from zig and towards things like binutils. When I read the headline I assumed that they were throwing out the compiler (IIRC they had mostly/totally excised it already). But for a project like zig it just seems like there's a lot to be gained from keeping it.

That said -- the prospect of rewriting a lot of the stuff that's in the LLVM project now in zig instead of c++ - that's pretty cool and ambitious. Just as ambitious as it was for Lattner to create LLVM, I suppose.

But code that's accidentally quadratic - well, that's bound to happen to zig too, if it's as popular and useful as LLVM project is.

I'm reminded of a recent interview with Chris Latner about the success of Swift - he credits the success to the fact that you could start with a large objective C project and begin writing Swift without rewriting anything. Part of Rust's success is off the back of a similar compatibility with C/C++.

It is difficult for me to imagine Zig succeeding without a similar capability - which is to say I hope they do not follow through on this milestone.

But rust absolutely does not have any C/C++ compatibilty besides arguably very good FFI. And that's where zig shines. They have a c/c++ compiler built into the zig compiler via zig cc, that's even easier to use than clang or GCC due to having the benefits of a buildscript and baked in libcs for different architectures, making crosscompilation a breeze.

In zig you _can_ actually start with a c codebase and rewrite it file by file in zig and you _can_ include c headers in your zig files verbatim. Both of these are not possible in rust.

This milestone is only gonna remove the c++ (and objective c/c++) compiler for now from zig cc. So while you could argue this will ostracize people rewriting their c++ codebases in zig, I don't imagine there's actually many people like that. EDIT: I just looked at the discussion and there's actually a lot of people that use the c++ capapbilities.

> In zig you _can_ actually start with a c codebase and rewrite it file by file in zig and you _can_ include c headers in your zig files verbatim. Both of these are not possible in rust.

well, you can: i have done this, with Rust. but yes, it’s more the type of thing that well-resourced companies do rather than solo devs, because even with Bindgen and the like Rust really wants the atomic codegen unit to be the “library”, not C’s notion of a “compilation unit”. still, C FFI compatibility is exactly why porting from C to rust incrementally is feasible while C to, say Java, is probably a bigger leap.

You still need a separate compiler toolchain next to Rust in order to compile the C, C++ and ObjC dependencies which is a massive build system headache (especially across UNIX-oids and Windows).

In Zig that all "just works" with the standard Zig install.

Show me a C/C++ project that doesn't need a build system.

https://github.com/floooh/sokol

...inspired by:

https://github.com/nothings/stb

(here's how the sokol headers are integrated into a Zig project, note that there is only a build.zig which builds everything: https://github.com/floooh/kc85.zig)

But it's not so much about build systems, but requiring a separate compiler toolchain to build any C++ or ObjC dependencies (Rust needs this, Zig currently does not - unless that controversial proposal is implemented).

(also even complex C++ libraries can be wrapped in a build.zig, so you don't require a separate build system like cmake for the C++ dependencies)