Zig 2024 roadmap

Zig 2024 roadmap

> My thinking for those "Portable assembler" people is a revision of C which eliminates all the Undefined Behaviour and in the process also removes any semblance of modern convenience or decent performance.

It wouldn't work. Because they are after efficiency, just feel that compiler have to provide it if possible and leave their low-level tricks alone if it doesn't understand something.

Usually they even realize that some unlimited undefined behaviors are needed (look on their semi-serious proposals… Loosening the basic model part is precisely about that), they just couldn't accept the fact that it's either fully defined behavior, or fully undefined behavior, their dreams of, somehow, pulling the rabbit out of the hat what-the-hardware-does behavior into high-level languages just wouldn't work.

And even if you would invent a way to define show right shift is supposed to work… they would immediately turn around and ask why compiler doesn't do the sensible thing and doesn't put local variables in registers (which is impossible in such a language).

No, it wouldn't be even that much slower if you would use it as “portable assembler” and would write code like you are writing assembler and compiler (that may usually do some optimizations, but not if you “code for the hardware”) just doesn't do anything. The problem is that they wouldn't be satisfied, anyway.

They don't really spend that much time arguing about things. They actually produce code and their rants are usually limited to complains about how this or that compiler misunderstands their genious ideas and instead of producing optimized code breaks their valuable programs.

When asked about what compiler should do instead they usually either provide random incompatible answers or just say that “compiler should preserve hardware semantics” without elaborating what that phrase even means.