Zig: Build System Reworked

I just upgraded some code to Zig 0.16.0 and I am actually really happy with the results. It impacted A LOT of things, but the changes were actually very good and seems to have set the language for a bright future, especially with the new IO mechanism which allows supper efficient code that looks good whether it's implemented single-threaded, multi-threaded or just via an event loop!

If you haven't tried Zig since 0.16.0 was released, I highly recommend having a look. The release notes for this release were huge!!

https://ziglang.org/download/0.16.0/release-notes.html

After having used Zig for a couple of months now I am convinced it is a fantastic tool language. You just pick it up to hack some idea together freely. Every time I hit a wall, I find the creators have thought of it already and offers comfort. But nothing gets in your face how to use the programming language "correctly".

For me it is now the go-to "tinker in my garage" language.

After watching Andrew Kelley's interview video makes me want to pick up Zig: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqddnwKF8HQ

There is an idea I've been kicking around for a long time, which I'll just call dual programming. The idea is to develop a stack that consists of just two programming languages, 1 higher level language, and one lower level language. You are supposed to do as much programming as you can in the high level language, and only drop into the low level language as needed. The problem is that unless you already know a low level programming language really well, you'll most likely have to re familiarize yourself with the language before doing the low level stuff.

This makes Cpp and Rust harder to use then say C, so C becomes the default for me. But C is not without its issues of which we are aware. But Zig feels like it could fill that sweet spot really well, being simple enough that it's easier to pick up after a long break, but still coming with a lot of modern tooling that makes programming easier.

> We’ll be releasing 0.17.0 within a couple weeks from now.

This is amazing. Didn't 0.16 take >1 year?

I was not expecting such a fast 0.17 release, but am very pleased to find this out today.

My kingdom for Zig to have an official mechanism to emit the Linux library stubs.

Zig’s ability to crosscompile and target arbitrary versions of glibc is PURE MAGIC. I leverage this magic in an unrelated C++ build system. But I have to hack around to get those library stubs from Zig. Would love it to be an official output.

This sounds like great news, Zig's compilation times are already terrific and this is going to only make them better.

Is there any proposed timeline for a stable release? Big features like the recent async IO shows the language is very unstable right now.

Bun is moving towards rust but does this also help bun's compilation times?

https://ziggit.dev/t/bun-s-zig-fork-got-4x-faster-compilatio...

Why would I want to use this over, say, Node.js and TypeScript?

Zig has so many compelling features, and I'd even be willing to give up Rust's near-perfect memory safety in some cases. But the one thing that really put me off is string handling. It's just so super tedious. I like being able to finely manage individual string memory allocations, but I really don't want to have to do it all the time. RAII is great; I wish they'd use some light (optional) RAII for strings and containers etc.

Would someone tell a rust user why they should and should not try zig?

So i checked the license of this project, can anyone pls clarify what is (Expat) after MIT License

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