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

[deadalnix]

On Monday, 29 January 2024 at 20:51:19 UTC, Don Allen wrote:
> 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.
>

So, I'm not too familiar with Zig, and haven't used Zig much. 
However, at least on this specific point, he is very right, and 
this is something we were able to measure at scale at Facebook.

The question can better be asked in the following form: if we 
want to reduce errors, do we slow down development speed, in such 
a way that we can be more careful to not introduce problems at 
every steps along the way, or do we speed things up, such as it 
is faster to fix bugs, and therefore more can be fixed.

The usual answer most would give in the software industry is that 
one needs to slow down and be more careful. But this is not what 
the data ended up showing. Quite the opposite in fact!

When it comes to Zig, I am not sure how much development is 
slowed down by the speed of the compiler itself, but if this is a 
significant part of the dev cycle, then one has to expect that 
making the compiler faster will creates an environment in which 
there are fewer bugs.