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

[Steven Schveighoffer]

On Wednesday, 31 January 2024 at 08:54:36 UTC, Paolo Invernizzi 
wrote:
> On Wednesday, 31 January 2024 at 02:34:34 UTC, Steven 
> Schveighoffer wrote:
>> On Tuesday, 30 January 2024 at 20:29:02 UTC, cc wrote:
>>> [...]
>>
>> I see a lot of posts about the speed of dmd. I've been 
>> basically using ldc exclusively when I switched to mac M1, 
>> and, I haven't been very disappointed.
>>
>> I'll say this, compiling my work project with dmd is 100x 
>> slower than compiling my personal projects with ldc.
>>
>> I don't know if it's LLVM, is all I'm saying.
>>
>
> As dmd is x86_64, on Apple silicon it uses rosetta, so ldc 
> which is aarch64 is faster as a compiler.

Work project is built with dmd on x86_64 linux.

My point really is that LDC is comparable, and still lightyears 
ahead (in speed) of the likes of C++ and Rust. I don't know what 
Zig is planning to achieve by removing LLVM, but I am comfortable 
with the time taken so far. It helps to have 2 things to compare 
such that you can judge what the true benefit will be. I wonder 
if Zig has gone through that exercise, or is just undergoing this 
large upheaval on the *hopes* that it makes things much faster 
(Disclaimer, I'm reacting to posts here, I haven't watched the 
video).

In my experience, the thing that slows down compilation is the 
complexity of the code, especially when using 
templates/generative code. That is all front-end stuff. I'd 
rather we work on fixing that.

-Steve