Aside from that: I'm not familiar with how standard base64 deals with endianness, so I'm not sure if it would match that, but this `@bitCast` would certainly give you a base64 encoding. But it would probably emit pretty terrible code to do that---our lowering of `@bitCast` isn't really optimized for moving around huge amounts of data in one operation! (But maybe LLVM would surprise me.)

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48345525

Points: 8

# Comments: 0

What do you mean by "interim"? As I explicitly stated in the comment you quoted, it has never, and likely will never, been planned for the Zig compiler to become incapable of using LLVM. The LLVM backend still sees plenty of active development by the core team [0]---that's perfectly compatible with improving the experience of users (including ourselves) by avoiding unnecessary uses of LLVM [1].

> ...is for Zig to generate LLVM binary files that can be passed to a separate LLVM instance as part of the build process. Is that "a first-class supported backend target for compilation"? I suppose it's a matter of semantics, but that certainly won't be the current LLVM backend that does LLVM API calls.

I think you are incorrectly assuming that we currently make heavy use of the LLVM API. As indicated by #13265 being closed, that is not true. The Zig compiler already generates bitcode by itself, without touching the LLVM API. The only thing we actually use the LLVM API for is feeding that bitcode to LLVM, which can easily be done by invoking a CLI instead. Users quite literally would not be able to tell if, for instance, we changed the compiler to pass the bitcode to Zig's embedded build of Clang over CLI.

[0]: https://ziglang.org/devlog/2026/#2026-04-08

[1]: https://ziglang.org/download/0.15.1/release-notes.html#x86-B...

Hm, are you referring to the CI failure on the x86_64-linux-release CI job on the current tip of master on the main Zig repository? That one's a flaky test, not indicative of a serious problem. (We usually just disable flaky tests, but this particular one I'm leaving on for the moment to try and gather a little more information about it.)

The tarball builds for the 0.16.0 release are still moving along okay: https://codeberg.org/ziglang/www.ziglang.org/actions/runs/20...

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47683229

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

For a concrete example, while testing this branch, I tried building ZLS (https://github.com/zigtools/zls/). To do that, the only change I had to make was changing `.{}` to `.empty` in a couple of its dependencies (i.e. not even in ZLS itself!). This was needed because I removed some default values from `std.ArrayList` (so the change was in standard library code rather than the language). Those default values had actually already been deprecated (with intent to remove) for around a year, so this wasn't exactly a new change either.

As another example, Andrew has updated Awebo (https://codeberg.org/awebo-chat/awebo), a text and voice chat application, to the new version of Zig. Across Awebo's entire dependency tree (which includes various packages for graphics, audio, and probably some other stuff), the full set of necessary changes was:

* Same as above, change `.{}` to `.empty` in a few places, due to removal of deprecated defaults

* Add one extra `comptime` annotation to logic which was constructing an array at comptime

* Append `orelse @alignOf(T)` onto an expression to deal with a newly-possible `null` case

These are all trivial fixes which Zig developers would be able to do pretty much on autopilot upon seeing the compile errors.

So, while there were a handful of small breaking changes, they don't seem to me like a particularly big deal (for a language where some level of breakage is still allowed). The main thing this PR achieved was instead a combination of bugfixes, and enhancements to existing features (particularly incremental compilation).

[0]: https://forgejo.org/docs/latest/user/actions/reference/ [1]: https://codeberg.org/mlugg/setup-zig/ [2]: https://code.forgejo.org/forgejo/runner/

[0]: https://docs.codeberg.org/getting-started/faq/#what-do-i-nee...

[1]: https://join.codeberg.org/

On the exact page you're on is a link to an issue [0] acknowledging that the CAPTCHA is inaccessible and expressing that they plan to drop it (albeit with no concrete time-frame). I don't at all understand your argument that Codeberg must be slow at replying to emails (the "manual fallback path") because Wikimedia are; these are two completely unrelated entities and I don't see why you would make inferences about one from the other.

[0]: https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/Community/issues/1797

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44925731

Points: 5

# Comments: 0