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by latch9 hours ago |
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upvoteby sidkshatriya5 hours ago|
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> The biggest issue I face daily are silent compiler errors (SIGBUS) for trivial things, e.g. a typo in an import path.

I don't use zig. My experience has been that caches themselves are sources of bugs (not talking about zig only, but in general). Clearing all relevant caches occasionally is useful when you're experiencing weird bugs.

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upvoteby sidkshatriya5 hours ago|
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I don't know why I was downvoted here. One day, I was experiencing weird compilation errors. Clearing the `ccache` C/C++ compiler cache helped get past the problem. Yes, I could have investigated in detail what was the issue and if ccache had a bug but sometimes you don't have the luxury of investigating everything your toolchain throws at you.
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upvoteby quag8 hours ago|
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That .zig-cache seems massive to me. I keep mine on a tmpfs and remove it every time the tmpfs is full.

Do you see any major problems when you remove your .zig-cache and start over?

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upvoteby latch8 hours ago|
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Just a slower build. From ~20 seconds to ~65 seconds the first time after I nuke it.
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upvoteby h4ch16 hours ago|
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But why is it so big in the first place?

I was searching around for causes and came across the following issues: https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/15358 which was moved to https://codeberg.org/ziglang/zig/issues/30193

The following quotes stand out

> zig's caching system is designed explicitly so that garbage collection could happen in one process simultaneously while the cache is being used by another process.

> I just ran WizTree to find out why my disk was full, and the zig cache for one project alone was like 140 GB.

> not only the .zig-cache directory in my projects, but the global zig cache directory which is caching various dependencies: I'm finding each week I have to clear both caches to prevent run-away disk space

Like what's going on? This doesn't seem normal at all. I also read somewhere that zig stores every version of your binary as well? Can you shed some light on why it works like this in zigland?

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upvoteby Cloudef6 hours ago|
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AFAIK garbage collection is basically not implemented yet. I myself do `ZIG_LOCAL_CACHE_DIR=~/.cache/zig` so I only have to nuke single directory whenever I feel like it.
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upvoteby divan2 hours ago|
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what exactly people call 'garbage collection' in Zig? build cache cleanup?
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upvoteby Cloudef2 hours ago|
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Indeed what was referred to here is the zig build system cache.
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upvoteby sgt6 hours ago|
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Does Zig have incremental builds yet? Or is it 20 secs each time for your build.
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upvoteby latch6 hours ago|
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20 seconds each time. Last time I tried to enable incremental build, it wasn't working for us. It was a while ago, but I think it had to do with something in our v8 bridge.
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upvoteby sgt6 hours ago|
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I have heard that from other Zig devs too. Must get a bit annoying as the project grows. But I guess it will be supported sooner or later.
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