Files
zig/stage0
Motiejus cba54e8e55 sema: comptime DECL_REF/FIELD_PTR resolution and CG builtin nav lookup
Infrastructure for comptime evaluation of declaration references:

- DECL_REF/DECL_VAL: in comptime context, resolve import values
  (returns root struct type for imports, CG builtin type for
  @import("builtin")) and non-import declarations (returns
  already-resolved nav values). Non-comptime path loads import
  side effects only.

- zirFieldPtr: in comptime, when operand is a struct type (its
  type is `type`), look up field in type's namespace. Only returns
  already-resolved nav values to avoid creating IP entries out of
  order.

- findNavInNamespace: handle CG builtin module (no ZIR) by using
  IP string_bytes for nav name comparison instead of ZIR
  string_bytes.

- Use resolveImportPath helper in non-comptime DECL_REF path
  instead of duplicating path resolution logic.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-02-26 21:19:54 +00:00
..
2026-02-20 12:33:48 +02:00
2026-02-26 00:45:27 +02:00
fmt
2026-02-20 10:30:47 +02:00
2026-02-17 10:56:11 +00:00
2026-02-26 18:50:45 +00:00

About

zig0 aspires to be an interpreter of zig 0.15.2 written in C.

Except for the lexer (written by hand by yours truly), it's been written by an LLM.

The goal of stage0 is to be able to implement enough zig to be able to build zig1.wasm. For that we need:

  1. Lexer: DONE, written by hand by yours truly in late 2024.
  2. Parser: DONE, written mostly by an LLM.
  3. AstGen: DONE, written fully by an LLM.
  4. Sema: in progress.

Testing

Quick test:

zig build fmt-zig0 test-zig0

Static analysis (takes a while, run separately):

zig build lint-zig0

More elaborate (tries all compilers + static analysis + ReleaseSafe):

zig build all-zig0 -Doptimize=ReleaseSafe

Most elaborate, takes >10m:

zig build all-zig0 -Doptimize=ReleaseSafe -Dvalgrind |& grep -v Warning

Debugging tips

Test runs infinitely? Build the test program executable:

$ zig build test-zig0 -Dzig0-no-exec

And then run it, capturing the stack trace:

gdb -batch \
    -ex "python import threading; threading.Timer(1.0, lambda: gdb.post_event(lambda: gdb.execute('interrupt'))).start()" \
    -ex run \
    -ex "bt full" \
    -ex quit \
    zig-out/bin/test

You are welcome to replace -ex "bt full" with anything other of interest.

Float Handling

Float literals are parsed with strtold() (C11 standard, portable). On x86-64 Linux, long double is 80-bit extended precision (63 fraction bits).

When a float doesn't round-trip through f64, it's emitted as f128 (ZIR float128 instruction). The 80-bit extended value is converted to IEEE 754 binary128 encoding by bit manipulation — both formats share the same 15-bit exponent with bias 16383. The top 63 of binary128's 112 fraction bits come from the 80-bit value; the bottom 49 are zero-padded.

This means float128 literals lose ~49 bits of precision compared to the upstream Zig implementation (which uses native f128). This is acceptable because stage0 is a bootstrap tool — the real Zig compiler re-parses all source with full f128 precision in later stages. The test comparison mask in astgen_test.zig skips float128 payloads to account for this.

Previous approach used __float128/strtof128 (GCC/glibc extensions) for full precision, but these are not portable to TCC and other C11 compilers.