comptime is absolutely the biggest difference, in Zig you'll find high quality, performant generic hash map implementations in the standard library. In hare there are no generics and you are encouraged to write your own hash maps as needed: https://harelang.org/blog/2021-03-26-high-level-data-structu...
> it actually builds a stub program and runs it in qemu for your target arch
That's not at all how the implementation works, the zig compiler does not depend on qemu. The comptime evaluation works much more like evaluating an interpreted language such as python.
> Andrew: In release fast mode, which is unsafe, you will get actual undefined behavior. So, you might crash or you might get overflow. You might go down to zero or you might run an unrelated function.
Are you perhaps confusing this with statements made about the debug and release safe build modes?
This comment is a perfect example of what Andrew was talking about here:
> Andrew: It’s funny how it just kind of changes course as the language gets taken more and more seriously. And now, all the comments are even starting to shift to kind of like the philosophy of memory safety and whether Zig is immoral.
I'd suggest you go listen to the podcast or at least read the "Zig Is Immoral and Unsafe" section of the transcript as well as the following one.
The fact that the author was able to find success with Zig so quickly speaks not only to the author's abilities but to the simplicity of Zig. Learning enough C++ or Rust to be productive in the same amount of time would be a much greater challenge.
This is due to zig enabling clangs UBSAN by default in unoptimized builds. This can be disabled with `-fno-sanitize=undefined` or by enabling optimizations with `-O2` or `-O3`.
Compile times of the stage1 zig compiler may seem fast compared to e.g. rust or C++ but they are slow compared to what the WIP stage2 compiler can do :)
You're totally right that at least 90% of the infrastructure is there. Andrew's been threatening to implement hot code swapping in a live stream but has been busy with other tasks it seems.