Release announcement:
<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;lists.llvm.org&#x2F;pipermail&#x2F;llvm-announce&#x2F;2018-September&#x2F;000080.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;lists.llvm.org&#x2F;pipermail&#x2F;llvm-announce&#x2F;2018-September...</a>Sub-project release notes:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;llvm.org&#x2F;releases&#x2F;7.0.0&#x2F;tools&#x2F;clang&#x2F;docs&#x2F;ReleaseNotes.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;llvm.org&#x2F;releases&#x2F;7.0.0&#x2F;tools&#x2F;clang&#x2F;docs&#x2F;ReleaseNote...</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;llvm.org&#x2F;releases&#x2F;7.0.0&#x2F;tools&#x2F;clang&#x2F;tools&#x2F;extra&#x2F;docs&#x2F;ReleaseNotes.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;llvm.org&#x2F;releases&#x2F;7.0.0&#x2F;tools&#x2F;clang&#x2F;tools&#x2F;extra&#x2F;docs...</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;llvm.org&#x2F;releases&#x2F;7.0.0&#x2F;tools&#x2F;lld&#x2F;docs&#x2F;ReleaseNotes.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;llvm.org&#x2F;releases&#x2F;7.0.0&#x2F;tools&#x2F;lld&#x2F;docs&#x2F;ReleaseNotes....</a>

I&#x27;m a C coder, a big fan of Rust and while I&#x27;ve heard of Zig before I still don&#x27;t really get what it&#x27;s going for. As far as I can tell it&#x27;s Rust without the borrow checker and the mental overhead that goes with it. Maybe it&#x27;s because I&#x27;m wearing my Rust glasses but some design choices seem a bit strange to me, for instance regarding Zig&#x27;s unions (equivalent to Rust&#x27;s enums or C&#x27;s tagged unions):<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ziglang.org&#x2F;documentation&#x2F;master&#x2F;#union" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ziglang.org&#x2F;documentation&#x2F;master&#x2F;#union</a><pre><code> const Payload = union {
 Int: i64,
 Float: f64,
 Bool: bool,
 };
</code></pre>
[...]<pre><code> var payload = Payload {.Int = 1234};
 &#x2F;&#x2F; payload.Float = 12.34; &#x2F;&#x2F; ERROR! field not active
 assert(payload.Int == 1234);
 &#x2F;&#x2F; You can activate another field by assigning the entire union.
 payload = Payload {.Float = 12.34};
 assert(payload.Float == 12.34);
</code></pre>
[...]<pre><code> &#x2F;&#x2F; Unions can be given an enum tag type:
 const ComplexTypeTag = enum { Ok, NotOk }; 
 const ComplexType = union(ComplexTypeTag) {
 Ok: u8,
 NotOk: void,
 };
</code></pre>
[...]<pre><code> const c = ComplexType { .Ok = 0 };
 assert(ComplexTypeTag(c) == ComplexTypeTag.Ok);
</code></pre>
That&#x27;s weird ergonomics IMO and quite a lot of typing. As far as
I can tell there&#x27;s no type inference? Also I&#x27;m not sure why const is used everywhere, even for things like type declarations, does Zig allow messing with types at runtime? That seems like a pretty high level language feature so it&#x27;s quite interesting if it does.Anyway, from what I see it&#x27;s basically somewhat halfway
between C and Rust, with some of the syntactic sugar of Rust but
not the borrow checker and everything that goes along with it.That being said the language is still very young and at this
stage Rust was a bit of a mess as well, what with the numerous
pointer types, green threads and the like... Maybe as they progress toward 1.0 they&#x27;ll be able to expose a clearer picture of what they&#x27;re doing.

I never view Go as a competitor to C, and Rust is more of an competitor to C++.Zig reads to me as something actually trying to displace C. Or C with no corner cases and some modern features.

It needs one, but I won&#x27;t argue with the editor-morons there, who doubt any usefulness on any serious project. I can still remember how often nimrod was deleted, and then nim. and others I won&#x27;t mention in their cleanup destruction rampages. We are the experts, not the Wikipedia editors, but they are treating it as their personal baby, and you should not interfere.

Zig needs a Wikipedia page!It seems like a competitor for Go or Rust? I&#x27;ve been looking into these languages a lot lately, but Zig looks interesting... I wish the website was better at showing off examples and the big features for the language though.

I&#x27;d be interested to hear out experience reports of people who tried to implement the same thing on C&#x2F;Rust&#x2F;Zig, like this one: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;isaachier&#x2F;gbemu" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;isaachier&#x2F;gbemu</a>

it does, the same as how it does in clang with -O3. There&#x27;s an open issue for adding guaranteed tail call semantics: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ziglang&#x2F;zig&#x2F;issues&#x2F;694" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ziglang&#x2F;zig&#x2F;issues&#x2F;694</a>it&#x27;s an important issue for the project because one of the things it is tackling is the problem of unbounded stack growth. zig wants to get to a state where upper bound stack size is known at compile-time.

Under &quot;External Open Source Projects Using LLVM 7&quot;:&gt; Zig is an open-source programming language designed for robustness, optimality, and clarity. Zig is an alternative to C, providing high level features such as generics, compile time function execution, partial evaluation, and LLVM-based coroutines, while exposing low level LLVM IR features such as aliases and intrinsics. Zig uses Clang to provide automatic import of .h symbols - even inline functions and macros. Zig uses LLD combined with lazily building compiler-rt to provide out-of-the-box cross-compiling for all supported targets.Nice shout out :)

We also had to turn off noalias for &amp;mut T for a while, due to bugs, and that was fixed fairly recently, and we turned it back on. I think that was post LLVM 6, but I can&#x27;t quite remember.

Rust 1.30 (now in beta) has already moved to a newer snapshot of trunk, LLVM 8ish.

Rust updates LLVM more commonly than LLVM does stable releases, so it has been using a version somewhere between LLVM 6 and LLVM 7 for a while already.I think one of the main areas that improved in LLVM 7 relative to LLVM 6 that Rust cares about is better support for WASM in LLD.

According to the &quot;Update to LLVM 7&quot; ticket for Rust (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;rust-lang&#x2F;rust&#x2F;issues&#x2F;50543" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;rust-lang&#x2F;rust&#x2F;issues&#x2F;50543</a>), many of the points of interest are in LLD, especially in WASM support:<pre><code> LLD has implemented --gc-sections for wasm
 LLD has implemented DWARF debugging information sections for wasm
 LLD has natively implemented concatenation of custom sections for wasm
 LLD has gained the ability to place the stack first in a wasm module&#x27;s memory layout, reducing the corruption that happens on a stack overflow
 LLD option to not merge data segments
 Some SIMD generic float intrinsics have been fixed
 LLD optimizing further the size of release binaries
 LLD supports @-file syntax
</code></pre>
Other things which mention LLVM 7 in the Rust bug tracker:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;rust-lang&#x2F;rust&#x2F;issues&#x2F;52457" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;rust-lang&#x2F;rust&#x2F;issues&#x2F;52457</a> &quot;use funnel shift intrinsic to implement rotates&quot;<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;rust-lang&#x2F;rust&#x2F;issues&#x2F;52323" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;rust-lang&#x2F;rust&#x2F;issues&#x2F;52323</a> &quot;emscripten already supports the wasm backend in LLVM7, so we should move the current emscripten-llvm from version 4.0 to that, so that we can remove all the workarounds lying around for LLVM &lt; 5.0 (LLVM 5 is the new minimum supported version).&quot;<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;rust-lang&#x2F;rust&#x2F;issues&#x2F;49740" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;rust-lang&#x2F;rust&#x2F;issues&#x2F;49740</a> &quot;Use separate memcpy source&#x2F;dest alignments in LLVM 7&quot;<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;rust-lang&#x2F;rust&#x2F;issues&#x2F;51872" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;rust-lang&#x2F;rust&#x2F;issues&#x2F;51872</a> &quot;Simplify u128-&gt;f32 casts thanks to LLVM r334777&quot;edit to add: rustc stable 1.29.0 already uses LLVM 7, and nightly is already using LLVM 8; rustc frequently switches to the new LLVM release when it is branched, it doesn&#x27;t wait until it is released:<pre><code> $ rustc +stable --version --verbose
 rustc 1.29.0 (aa3ca1994 2018-09-11)
 binary: rustc
 commit-hash: aa3ca1994904f2e056679fce1f185db8c7ed2703
 commit-date: 2018-09-11
 host: x86_64-apple-darwin
 release: 1.29.0
 LLVM version: 7.0
 $ rustc +nightly --version --verbose
 rustc 1.30.0-nightly (79fcc58b2 2018-09-18)
 binary: rustc
 commit-hash: 79fcc58b24d85743d025fd880fca55748662ed3e
 commit-date: 2018-09-18
 host: x86_64-apple-darwin
 release: 1.30.0-nightly
 LLVM version: 8.0</code></pre>

Is there anything of particular interest to Rust? I&#x27;m know Rust is built on LLVM (for both good and ill but mostly good).

IIRC it has been considered experimental since version 6. Many people were hoping it would be upgraded to fully supported in version 7.

Rust has been able to target RISC-V for half a year, so LLVM must have been able to target it for even longer...

rare? GCC supports far more architectures than LLVM

Too bad RISC-V didn&#x27;t manage to be included yet. Even GCC already supports it. A rare case when LLVM behind GCC on architecture support.

Does this page explain the parent&#x27;s question? It specifically mentions keeping the minor version more than once.

LLVM adopted a new version scheme which made the minor version redundant. IIRC someone suggested to remove it and nobody objected.<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.llvm.org&#x2F;2016&#x2F;12&#x2F;llvms-new-versioning-scheme.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.llvm.org&#x2F;2016&#x2F;12&#x2F;llvms-new-versioning-scheme.htm...</a>

Building MESA I had to change my script from &quot;6.0&quot; to &quot;7&quot; indeed.

Is there a reason that the libraries have been renamed from 7.0 to 7?

The last update I saw was from July:<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;lists.llvm.org&#x2F;pipermail&#x2F;llvm-foundation&#x2F;2018-July&#x2F;000162.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;lists.llvm.org&#x2F;pipermail&#x2F;llvm-foundation&#x2F;2018-July&#x2F;00...</a>

Does anyone know where the re-licensing effort stands?

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gcc.gnu.org&#x2F;onlinedocs&#x2F;gcc&#x2F;Function-Multiversioning.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gcc.gnu.org&#x2F;onlinedocs&#x2F;gcc&#x2F;Function-Multiversioning....</a>

Read the release notes and you&#x27;ll find out. You&#x27;ll also find out function multi-versioning isn&#x27;t even mentioned!

What are the main new features and why are they important? E.g. what&#x27;s &quot;function multiversioning&quot;?

LLVM 7.0.0 released