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I think this proposal would hurt the Zig ecosystem more than it would help it, due to several reasons:
- Adoption of compilers and languages in the embedded is basically driven by the code generation quality in terms of size. We have to be on-par or better than GCC and LLVM to be even considered tmto be adopted. 2%-5% bigger code is often not an annoyance, but a technical problem.
- A lot of projects use C++ code and might benefit from build.zig “as is”. This could lead to adoption of Zig, with the build system as a kick-start. Removing support for C++ will hurt adoption a lot, because now the build of C++ projects with some additional Zig code will be even worse than just adding more cmake. Thus, a lot of projects wouldnt benefit from Zig in terms of quality of life, as it is yet another build tool.
- Zig is with its “batteries included” cross-compilation the best toolchain for doing native development. We would basically downgrade our toolchain to something Go where we rely on external tools to successfully build more complex projects. Even in the current state, its often so much easier to yeet zig at something to get it to build than even trying to get a cross-build running with existing tools
- Considering the scenario i have at work, introducing Zig as a build environment for several million lines of C++ would make a lot of people happy, as the builds would be faster, easier maintainable and trivially portable to other OS. With C++ and LLVM support removed, i dont see any chance of Zig adoption at this company
Imho, this proposal strongly violates the
Together we serve end users
idea, as the current direction we’re heading is a really good unified native build environment based on a single static executable that can serve projects in arbitrar, sizes, shipping compilers for several major languages, a huge ass support for targets and a build system, making work in systems programming fun, even if one doesnt use Zig as a language.
We are on a good way to replace a huge list of tools with a single executable, making contributions to projects build on Zig fun, easy and platform independent.
When this proposal is accepted, in addition to Zig one will need to have the following tools installed:
- (GNU) Make
- premake
- meson
- CMake
- ninja
-
$(arch)-$(os)-$(abi)-gcc
- llvm/clang
- GNU autotools
- m4
- vcpkg
- gradle
- conan
- qmake
- SCons
- maven
- …
We can potentially replace all of those tools wit a single, equally powerful executable, making the live easier for all native devs out there
personal projects that would be affected:
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