Christian Queyrouze (Feb 17 2024 at 19:26): Christian Queyrouze (Feb 17 2024 at 19:26):I'm new to building compilers, but I've learned that I love working on the concept and code from an interpreted math engine I'm building in Zig. I'd like to learn how this codebase works so that I can actively use it to learn and actively contribute to it.
I've found the document on Project ideas, but It'd also be cool if someone could point me to a list of the use cases so I have an more end to end idea of the direction of the language. I've listen to a lot of content from @Richard Feldman, so I have a pretty good idea of what its used for and the benefits which is why I'm interested, but they're not super concrete.
Richard Feldman (Feb 17 2024 at 19:39):welcome!
Richard Feldman (Feb 17 2024 at 19:40):I'm not sure exactly what you're looking for in terms of "list of use cases" but maybe this interview might help? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssw0_udPla0&pp=ygUTcmljaGFyZCBmZWxkbWFuIHJvYw%3D%3D
Richard Feldman (Feb 17 2024 at 19:41):in general, the idea is for Roc to be useful in the "long tail of use cases" by giving platform authors a way to write tailored platforms for those use cases
Richard Feldman (Feb 17 2024 at 19:43):some non-goals include:
Richard Feldman (Feb 17 2024 at 19:47):a non-exhaustive list of use cases we're aiming for:
Richard Feldman (Feb 17 2024 at 19:48):browser GUIs might work too, although it wasn't an original motivating use case (because Elm is so good at that already) and we don't have a working proof of concept at this point
Christian Queyrouze (Feb 17 2024 at 20:05):Thank you! and I'll check out the video when I'm not in public.
I think that list gives me a pretty good idea of what the language is for. I want some toy projects I can build a run to understand how the code works and should be working.
I'm a pretty big fan of the idea of hot swapping functions and not deallocating data until the end of a program including other language concepts that you've talked about on you're podcast. I'm a big believer that this language can run at or close to the speed of Zig, C, and other low level languages for the right use cases, and I think it can beat Rust for what it's good at because of the cost of abstracting memory management. I've also been looking for a functional language to replace Elixir in the web world.
Quick question, what's the benefit of self hosting the compiler? I've used a lot of high level languages that do that, and it always seems to be more of detriment than a benefit (obviously take what I say with a grain of salt. I'm not super knowledgeable on the topic).
Christian Queyrouze (Feb 17 2024 at 20:07):I'm also happy you said it's good for games, because I was thinking about how useful it'd be for a game idea I had today.
Brendan Hansknecht (Feb 17 2024 at 20:19):Quick question, what's the benefit of self hosting the compiler?
For a lot project it means the dev team actually gets to program in the language they built and love. So it is a huge boon in that sense. Otherwise, it is mostly done to test the compiler more. In many cases the compiler itself is one of the first large projects in a language.
Brendan Hansknecht (Feb 17 2024 at 20:20):Also, in some cases, it is done cause the compiler is more mature and could really use a rewrite in general.
Norbert Hajagos (Feb 18 2024 at 19:26):Quick question, what's the benefit of self hosting the compiler?
Bonus tip when you have decided you want to self host: You could create the first version of the compiler in a language which is really fast to iterate in for that purpuse, like OCaml (I've heard), and switch to the new version asap.
If you want to write a fast compiler, you do it in a systems language like C. But you would not want to write C for too long if your new language is also a systems language.
Last updated: Jul 26 2025 at 12:14 UTC