Isn't Zig working on their own backend?
Also, pretty excited about the cranelift project.
this post was submitted on 16 Sep 2025
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GCC is adding cool new languages too!
They just recently added COBOL and Modula-2. Algol 68 is coming in GCC 16.
cool new languages
COBOL
That's like... It's purpose. Compilers always have a frontend and a backend. Even when the compiler is entirely made from scratch (like Java or go), it is split between front and backend, that's just how they are made.
So it makes sense to invest in just a few highly advanced backends (llvm, gcc, msvc) and then just build frontends for those. Most projects choose llvm because, unlike the others, it was purpose built to be a common ground, but it's not a rule. For example, there is an in-developement rust frontend for GCC.
that’s just how they are made.
Can confirm, even the little training compiler we made at Uni for a subset of Java (Javali) had a backend and frontend.
I can't imagine trying to spit out machine code while parsing the input without an intermediary AST stage. It was complicated enough with the proper split.
I can imagine;
Great optimisation, awwwful compile times.
New kid on the block, roc, has it right by splitting application code from "platform"/framework code, precompiling and optimising the platform, then using their fast surgical linker to sew the app code to the platform code.
Platforms are things like cli program, web server that kind of thing. Platforms provide an interface of domain specific IO primitives and handle all IO and memory management, and they also specify what functions app code must supply to complete the program.
It's pretty cool, and they're getting efficiency in the area of systems programming languages like C and Rust, but with none of the footguns of manual memory management, no garbage collection pauses, but yet also no evil stepparent style borrow checker to be beaten by. They pay a lot of attention to preventing cache misses and branch prediction failures, which is his they get away with reference counting and still being fast.
A note of caution: I might sound like I know about it, but I know almost nothing.
That sounds pretty great. My impression is that relatively little code actually runs that often.
but with none of the footguns of manual memory management, no garbage collection pauses, but yet also no evil stepparent style borrow checker to be beaten by.
That part sounds implausible, though. What kind of memory management are they doing?
Reference counting.
They pay a lot of attention to preventing cache misses and branch prediction failures, which is how they get away with reference counting and still being fast.
Oh, you just mean it's a kind of garbage collection that's lighter on pauses. Sorry, I've had the "my pre-Rust pet language already does what Rust does" conversation on here too many times.
To be fair, the drop/dealloc "pause" is very different from what people usually mean when they say "garbage collection pause", i.e. stop-the-world (...or at least a slice of the world).
It's a post rust language.
Dude, do you think rust doesn't free up memory for you? That would be the biggest memory leak in history! No! Rust does reference counting, it just makes sure that that number is always one! What did you think the borrow checker was for?
In roc, because the platform is in charge of memory management, it can optimise, so that a web server can allocate an arena for each client, a game loop can calculate what it needs in advance etc etc.
But like I say, they do a lot of work on avoiding cache misses and branch mispredictions, which are their own source of "stop the world while I page in from main memory" or "stop the pipeline while I build a new one". If it was doing traditional garbage collection, that would be an utterly pointless microoptimisation.
Rust isn't a religion. Don't treat it like one.
When it was very new a bunch of C programmers shit on its ideas and said C was the only real systems programming language, but rust, which was pretty much Linear ML dressed up in C style syntax came from hyper weird functional programming language to trusted systems programming language. Why? Because it does memory management sooooo much better than C and is just about as fast. Guess what roc is doing? Memory management soooooo much better than C, and sooooo much less niggly and hard to get right than the borrow checker and is just about as fast.
Plenty of beginners program in rust by just throwing clone at every error the borrow checker sends them, or even unsafe! Bye bye advantages of rust, because it was hard to please. Roc calculates from your code whether it needs to clone (eg once for a reference to an unmodified value, each time for an initial value for the points in a new data structure), and like rust, frees memory when it's not being used.
Rust does manual cloning. Roc does calculated cloning. Rust wins over C for memory safety by calculating when to free rather than using manual free, totally eliminating a whole class of bugs. Roc could win over rust by calculating when to clone, eliminating a whole class of unnecessary allocation and deallocation. Don't be so sure that no one could do better than rust. And the devXP in rust is really poor.
Yeah, I think Go's compiler is so fast partially because it doesn't use LLVM
That would work!