Zig's Andrew Kelley: "The compiler is too dam slow, that's why we have bugs..."

[Don Allen]

On Monday, 29 January 2024 at 08:04:57 UTC, Per Nordlöw wrote:
> I'm glad Andrew too has realized in what order to fix things - 
> we all should consider performance-problems bugs.
>
> See:
>
> https://youtu.be/5eL_LcxwwHg?t=565

He thinks they have bugs because the compiler is too slow? That 
is truly remarkable.

Does Rust accumulate open bugs at the rate we have been seeing 
for years in the Zig project? The Rust compiler is far slower 
than the Zig compiler. I've used them both. Haskell? GHC is 
pretty slow, too.

I'm surprised by this, because Andrew usually seems like a smart, 
sensible guy. Had he said "We've got lot of bugs. Speeding up the 
compiler would help to increase the rate at which we can fix 
them" I wouldn't have reacted this way. Perhaps that's what he 
meant. But that's not what he said.

And I can tell you from personal experience that the open bugs 
are a big issue with Zig. Every time I've checked in with Zig 
(it's been three or four years) and tried to use it, I run into a 
serious problem with the compiler. Zig is not good enough yet for 
production work, nor do they claim to be, simply based on the 
version number with the leading zero. But Andrew's marketing 
flair seems to have attracted a lot of followers. At least in the 
compiler area, D seems to be the opposite. No marketing flair, 
but DMD in my experience is rock solid (and FAST). Even the 
much-maligned Phobos has worked well for me. D's documentation, 
though far from perfect, is far better than zig's, which I think 
is absolutely awful. I'm not so enthusiastic about dfmt and dub.