Files
zig/stage0
Motiejus 9cd2e0ff77 stage0: refactor globals into structs matching Zig architecture
Eliminates all 39 mutable static globals across sema.c (37) and
intern_pool.c (2). State is now held in properly-typed structs passed
as parameters, mirroring the Zig reference implementation layout.

New files matching Zig src/ layout:
- compilation.h: CompilationConfig + Compilation (matches Compilation.zig)
- zcu.h/zcu.c: ZcuFile, ZcuNamespace, Zcu, zcuInit/zcuDeinit (matches Zcu.zig)
- zcu_per_thread.h: forward declarations for PerThread-style functions

Key changes:
- InternPool gains navs[] (dynamically allocated) + nav_count/nav_cap;
  Nav functions now take InternPool* (was implicit via globals)
- Sema gains Zcu* zcu; semaInit now takes Zcu* instead of InternPool*
- All module-level state (files, namespaces, memoized state, config)
  moved from static globals into Zcu struct
- zig0.c creates Compilation + Zcu before semaInit
- Test files updated to use zcuInit/zcuDeinit API

Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 4.6 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-03-02 16:44:27 +00:00
..
2026-02-20 12:33:48 +02:00
2026-02-26 00:45:27 +02:00
2026-03-02 01:14:56 +00:00
2026-02-17 10:56:11 +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.