That could be a lot of fun to play with, especially if it has PowerVM.

POWER 8 with AS/400 AFAIK had PowerVM as mandatory requirement (runs with VIOS)

Very cool! What compilers and interpreters are available? I know that rexx wasn't available at the time that the open source vm/370 was released. Has the community found a way to add rexx?

Interesting! I never imagined that would be a thing. Thought that zerks were only for grease.

Yes, you can build cross-platform GUI apps with Delphi. However, that requires using Firemonkey (FMX). If you build a GUI app using VCL on Delphi, it's limited to Windows. If you build an app with Lazarus and LCL, you CAN have it work cross-platform.

I thought the point was that Windows apps will run on Linux under Wine (and macOS?) so using VCL is a cross-platform GUI development environment.

I made the clarification because the comment I replied to mentioned Android, iOS, and macOS. There are many who used Delphi before FMX appeared and I thought it would be helpful to point out that VCL only makes Windows executables.

You might as well use Lazarus and LCL. It'll give the best of all worlds.

"A lot of code can be pessimized by golfing instruction counts"

Can you explain what this phrase means?

An old approach to micro-optimization is to look at the generated assembly, and trying to achieve the same thing with fewer instructions. However, modern CPUs are able to execute multiple instructions in parallel (out-of-order execution), and this mechanism relies on detecting data dependencies between instructions.

It means that the shorter sequence of instructions is not necessarily faster, and can in fact make the CPU stall unnecessarily.

The fastest sequence of instructions is the one that makes the best use of the CPU’s resources.

I’ve done this: I had a hot loop and I discovered that I could reduce instruction counts by adding a branch inside the loop. Definitely slower, which I expected, but it’s worth measuring.

Sounds nice! I could see where that could be simultaneously rewarding and frustrating. Best of luck to you.

This was the first thought that occurred to me too when I saw this post.

I would be more inclined to use it if it didn't have punctuation within the name.

I've been using it as my daily driver for ~3 years now.

The punctuation hasn't bothered me once in that time.

I've enjoyed a much more stable Linux desktop experience than I had on other distros in the past when I tried though.

That only works for really small holes.

I've been holding off on Zig because it hasn't reached 1.0 milestone, but I'm starting to think that it might be time to start digging in. Is Ziglings kept up with language changes being made in Zig? It would be very frustrating to find that Ziglings is out of sync with the newer version of Zig that you might be using at the time.

It uses the development version so it keeps in sync. I don't think we'll see many changes in the language itself before 1.0, they are no longer accepting changes to it. Most changes from now on will be in the Standard Library.