> Though Zig might edge out Rust for this use case once it stabilises.
Zig has a meaningful advantage in the context of this discussion: lazy compilation. The compiler won't even semantically analyze a block of code unless the target requires that to happen.
Currently, dependencies are more eager than they really need to be, but making them just as lazy as compilation is on the roadmap. Lazy compilation means no tree shaking is needed, and it means that the actual build-graph of a program can be traced on a fine-grained level. We might not be able to audit a hundred dependencies, but auditing the actual used code from all those dependencies might be more practical.
This is well positioned to handle a common pattern: `small-lib` provides some useful stuff, but also has extensions for working with `huge-framework`, and it needs to have `huge-framework` as a dependency to do so. Currently this means that the build system will fetch `huge-framework`, but if we can get it lazy enough, even that won't have to happen unless the code consuming `small-lib` touches the `huge-framework` dependency, which won't happen unless the program itself needs `huge-framework`.
Existing build systems don't do such a great job with that kind of structure, and the culprit is eagerness.
Zig has a meaningful advantage in the context of this discussion: lazy compilation. The compiler won't even semantically analyze a block of code unless the target requires that to happen.
Currently, dependencies are more eager than they really need to be, but making them just as lazy as compilation is on the roadmap. Lazy compilation means no tree shaking is needed, and it means that the actual build-graph of a program can be traced on a fine-grained level. We might not be able to audit a hundred dependencies, but auditing the actual used code from all those dependencies might be more practical.
This is well positioned to handle a common pattern: `small-lib` provides some useful stuff, but also has extensions for working with `huge-framework`, and it needs to have `huge-framework` as a dependency to do so. Currently this means that the build system will fetch `huge-framework`, but if we can get it lazy enough, even that won't have to happen unless the code consuming `small-lib` touches the `huge-framework` dependency, which won't happen unless the program itself needs `huge-framework`.
Existing build systems don't do such a great job with that kind of structure, and the culprit is eagerness.