This is a very interesting discussion that focuses on Zig as a build system.
Also available as podcast: https://pod.link/developer-voices/episode/9c4985d9ca07a7b352f94c65b995a003
Notes:
- Python is basically a nice frontend to a lot of C libraries
- Docker containers for every OS/Arch are commonly used in CI to build binaries
- Python Wheels have eliminated a lot of the pain of native code in Python packages, but they are simply pre-built binaries – they still need to be build somewhere.
- Zig proposed to cross-compile C code from one machine.
- Zig packages all of the various libc and platform bits required to cross build on any platform (like Go).
- Discussion of the problems of cross-compiling C code
- The Python package index size is growing a lot due to all the binaries that are stored for every architecture and version (see graph below).
- Zig build is declarative, but still creates a build graph.
- There is no such thing as a clean operation for Zig build – no reason to clean your cache.
- Zig cache is more than just timestamps: inode, hash of file, etc.
- Can install Zig using pypi: ziglang · PyPI
- Zig gets rid of all your build dependencies – one dependency is both your compiler, build system, and package manager.
- Loris Cro has written a static site generator in Zig. Uses the Zig build system to build the site.
I think we’re seeing the future here. Build systems (including cross-compilation) are moving to the language domain. This has already happened with Go and Rust – it looks like Zig is positioned to make this change for C.
