Author builds paella, a C compiler in Zig, following Nora Sandler’s Writing a C Compiler, completing 10 chapters from parsing through functions and linking.
Key Takeaways
Project is named paella; covers unary, binary, logic, variables, conditions, blocks, loops, functions, and linking across 10 structured chapters.
Explicitly a dual-purpose exercise: learn Zig as a first foray into the language, and fill time while between jobs.
Follows Nora Sandler’s book chapter-by-chapter, making it a reproducible learning path for anyone wanting structured compiler construction in Zig.
Articles were written during the build and collected with minimal editing, so they read as real-time notes rather than polished tutorials.
Series is open-ended; author signals intent to continue if/when resuming the book.
Hacker News Comment Review
Repo evidence (c19.md) suggests the author burned out on the low-level nature of the work and stopped mid-series, raising the question of how far this approach scales before Zig’s manual control becomes friction.
Commenters flag a strategic angle: a Zig-native C compiler could eventually reduce Zig’s dependency on Clang/LLVM for its C frontend, tying this learning project to a real gap in the Zig toolchain ecosystem.
