alt Hacker NewsMy homepage takes 73ms to rebuild: 17ms to recompile the static site generator, then 56ms to run it.
andy@bark ~/d/andrewkelley.me (master)> zig build --watch -fincremental
Build Summary: 3/3 steps succeeded
install success
└─ run exe compile success 57ms MaxRSS:3M
└─ compile exe compile Debug native success 331ms
Build Summary: 3/3 steps succeeded
install success
└─ run exe compile success 56ms MaxRSS:3M
└─ compile exe compile Debug native success 17ms
watching 75 directories, 1 processesReplies
Neat, I guess?
This comment would be a lot better if it engaged with the posted article, or really had any sort of insight beyond a single compile time metric. What do you want me to take away from your comment? Zig good and Rust bad?
@AndyKelley I'm super curious what you think the main factors are that make languages like Zig super fast at compiling where languages like Rust and Swift are quite slow. What's the key difference?
My non-static Rust website (includes an actual webserver as well as a react-like framework for templating) takes 1.25s to do an incremental recompile with "cargo watch" (which is an external watcher that just kills the process and reruns "cargo run").
And it can be considerably faster if you use something like subsecond[0] (which does incremental linking and hotpatches the running binary). It's not quite as fast as Zig, but it's close.
However, if that 331ms build above is a clean (uncached) build then that's a lot faster than a clean build of my website which takes ~12s.
Nice. Didn't realize zig build has --watch and -fincremental added. I was mostly using "watchexec -e zig zig build" for recompile on file changes.
Zig is a small and simple language. It doesn't need a complicated compiler.
Rust is a large and robust language meant for serious systems programming. The scope of problems Rust addresses is large, and Rust seeks to be deployed to very large scale software problems.
These two are not the same and do not merit an apples to apples comparison.
edit: I made some changes to my phrasing. I described Zig as a "toy" language, which wasn't the right wording.
These languages are at different stages of maturity, have different levels of complexity, and have different customers. They shouldn't be measured against each other so superficially.
Just like every submission about C/C++ gets a comment about how great Rust is, every submission about Rust gets a comment about how great Zig is. Like a clockwork.
Edit: apparently I am replying to the main Zig author? Language evangelism is by far the worst part of Rust and has likely stirred up more anti Rust sentiment than “converting” people to Rust. If you truly care for your language you should use whatever leverage you have to steer your community away from evangelism, not embrace it.