alt Hacker NewsI maintain a ~250K LoC Zig compiler code base [0]. We've been through several breaking Zig releases (although the code base was much smaller for most of that time; Writergate is the main one we've had to deal with since the code base crossed the 100K LoC mark).
The language and stdlib changing hasn't been a major pain point in at least a year or two. There was some upgrade a couple of years ago that took us awhile to land (I think it might have been 0.12 -> 0.13 but I could be misremembering the exact version) but it's been smooth sailing for a long time now.
These days I'd put breaking releases in the "minor nuisance" category, and when people ask what I've liked and disliked about using Zig I rarely even remember to bring it up.
Replies
What's the main value proposition of roc? I found interesting tags (like symbols in mathematica) and tags with payloads (like python namedtuple or dataclasses). I haven't seen this elsewhere. Otherwise seems quite typical (Pattern matching is quite common, for example).
Example programs that you couldn't easily express in other languages?
Are you aware that your Github README doesn't actually tell us anything about Roc is or why we might be interested?
This might be on purpose given the first words are "Work in progress" and "not ready for release", but linking as above does lose some value.
At this point do you believe porting the codebase to Zig was the right decision? Do you have any regrets?
Also, I'm excited about trying out your language even moreso than Zig. :)