How I Built a Language That Beats C on LZ77 by 6.6 — Bootstrapped from Assembly

Disclosure: This project was built with AI assistance (Claude).

I built a systems programming language called Jda from scratch — zero C, zero Rust,
zero Python anywhere in the toolchain. The compiler is bootstrapped from raw x86-64
assembly, fully self-hosted, and compiles itself to a byte-identical binary.

## The Headline Result

On LZ77 compression (1 MB of data), Jda clocks 277ms against:

• C (clang -O2): 1,830ms — Jda is 6.6× faster
• Rust (rustc -O): 2,185ms — Jda is 7.9× faster
• Go: 2,721ms — Jda is 9.8× faster

Jda is running via Rosetta 2 x86-64 on Apple Silicon — not even native ARM64.

## Full Benchmark Table (Apple Silicon, ms, lower is better)

| Benchmark | C | Rust | Go | Jda |
|---|--:|--:|--:|--:|
| Sudoku — 500 puzzles | 62 | 62 | 66 | 41 |
| LZ77 — 1 MB compress | 1,830 | 2,185 | 2,721 | 277 |
| Regex — 8 pats × 100K | 98 | 221 | 813 | 186 |
| B-Tree — 1M ops | 282 | 297 | 318 | 586 |
| Raytracer — 800×600 | 19 | 21 | 35 | 331 |

Jda wins 3 of 5 benchmarks against native ARM64 compiled languages.

## Why Is LZ77 6.6× Faster Than C?

Two compiler optimizations do the work:

1. MOD→AND strength reduction

The LZ77 hash-chain uses a 4096-entry window. Every iteration computes:
hash % 4096
Jda's compiler rewrites this to:
hash & 4095
This eliminates every IDIV instruction from the inner loop. C, Rust, and Go
all keep the slower division form on this pattern.

2. Loop-Invariant Code Motion (LICM)

The maximum match length and first-byte filter are loop-invariant — Jda hoists
them out of the inner match scan, halving the number of iterations.

## Sudoku: 1.5× Faster Than C and Rust

The hot path is a bitmask scan over candidates. Jda's MOD→AND peephole,
copy propagation, and loop register promotion eliminate redundant work that
gcc/clang keeps in memory.

## Self-Hosting

The compiler bootstraps like this:

Assembly → jda0 → compiles jda1.jda → jda1
↓
compiles jda1.jda → jda1_sh2
↓
compiles jda1.jda → jda1_sh3
↑
byte-identical to sh2

Fixed point converged. 388 conformance tests passing.

## Compile Speed

| | gcc -O2 | rustc -O | go build | Jda |
|--|--:|--:|--:|--:|
| Average | 479ms | 1,497ms | 712ms | 43ms |

33× faster than Rust. Single-pass compiler, no linker, no intermediate files.

## What It Has

• No GC — manual memory with alloc_pages
• Goroutine-style green threads + channels
• Tensors, autograd, neural networks
• AVX-512 / CUDA / ROCm acceleration
• 117 stdlib packages
• Full-stack web framework (Jda Forge)
• VS Code + JetBrains plugins

## Try It

bash
  curl -sSf https://jdalang.org/install.sh | sh

  - GitHub: https://github.com/jdalang/jda-lang
  - Website: https://jdalang.org
  - Benchmarks: https://jdalang.org/benchmarks/complex-benchmarks/

  All benchmark source code is in the repo — six implementations of each problem
  (C, Rust, Go, Jda, Ruby, Python) side by side.

  Would love feedback on the language design, benchmark methodology, or anything
  that feels wrong or missing.