See #770
To help automatically translate code, see the
zig-fmt-pointer-reform-2 branch.
This will convert all & into *. Due to the syntax
ambiguity (which is why we are making this change),
even address-of & will turn into *, so you'll have
to manually fix thes instances. You will be guaranteed
to get compile errors for them - expected 'type', found 'foo'
The purpose of this is:
* Only one way to do things
* Changing a function with void return type to return a possible
error becomes a 1 character change, subtly encouraging
people to use errors.
See #632
Here are some imperfect sed commands for performing this update:
remove arrow:
```
sed -i 's/\(\bfn\b.*\)-> /\1/g' $(find . -name "*.zig")
```
add void:
```
sed -i 's/\(\bfn\b.*\))\s*{/\1) void {/g' $(find ../ -name "*.zig")
```
Some cleanup may be necessary, but this should do the bulk of the work.
Some performance comparisons to C.
We take the fastest time measurement taken across multiple runs.
The block hashing functions use the same md5/sha1 methods.
```
Cpu: Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-6500 CPU @ 3.20GHz
Gcc: 7.2.1 20171224
Clang: 5.0.1
Zig: 0.1.1.304f6f1d
```
See https://www.nayuki.io/page/fast-md5-hash-implementation-in-x86-assembly:
```
gcc -O2
661 Mb/s
clang -O2
490 Mb/s
zig --release-fast and zig --release-safe
570 Mb/s
zig
50 Mb/s
```
See https://www.nayuki.io/page/fast-sha1-hash-implementation-in-x86-assembly:
```
gcc -O2
588 Mb/s
clang -O2
563 Mb/s
zig --release-fast and zig --release-safe
610 Mb/s
zig
21 Mb/s
```
In short, zig provides pretty useful tools for writing this sort of
code. We are in the lead against clang (which uses the same LLVM
backend) with us being slower only against md5 with GCC.
