[Info-vax] Zig (was: Re: Clang (was: Re: What does VMS get used for, these days?))

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2022-11-14 23:02:43 +0000, Stephen Hoffman said:

> On 2022-11-14 19:06:26 +0000, Simon Clubley said:
> 
>> And now you need a C++17 compiler to be able to build LLVM itself...
> 
> Do you have a particular environment where that's an issue?
> 
> Porting incrementally using cross-compilation (from a working Clang 
> else-platform) avoids creating a massive integation and testing effort 
> at the end of the usual development schedule, after all.
> 
> Get the code generation working cross-platform earlier in the porting 
> and development schedule, and implement cross-linking if nessary, and 
> build out the tooling toward native builds from there.
> 
> Best don't try to do everything all at once and out at the end of the schedule.


Zig: https://ziglang.org/#Small-simple-language

Here's a different approach to porting: the Zig compiler bootstraps 
using WebAssembly. Which means getting WebAssembly going. Which then 
means getting the interpreter going first, or getting a modern web 
browser going.

Yeah, it's from a podcast: 
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/bootstrapping-a-compiler-via-wasm-with-loris-cro/id1602572955?i=1000591301501 


For an intro to WebAssembly: 
https://sensepost.com/blog/2018/introduction-to-webassembly/

Also:
https://blog.battlefy.com/zig-and-webassembly-are-a-match-made-in-heaven
https://dev.to/sleibrock/webassembly-with-zig-part-1-4onm
https://www.jaybosamiya.com/publications/2022/usenix/provably-safe-sandboxing-wasm.pdf 

https://blog.cloudflare.com/workerd-open-source-workers-runtime/
https://ziglang.org/documentation/master/#Introduction
https://kristoff.it/blog/maintain-it-with-zig/

And for completeness: https://github.com/wasm3/wasm3 (and presently, 
the latest fix to that was for Zig support.)

Mostly unrelated to the above, but using Zig, and probably not a path 
for the OpenVMS port to AArch64 support: 
https://github.com/stakach/uefi-bootstrap




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