Zig SDK & Zig Toolsets Progress Report - March 2023

[alexrp]

This is the first in a new series of progress reports. These will be posted with a monthly-ish cadence when there's notable progress made on the project.

Tracking Zig Releases

Zig is currently undergoing a transition from its old compiler written in C++ to the new compiler written in Zig itself. This has caused some breakage in 0.10.0 and 0.10.1 that affects us and blocks the upgrade from 0.9.1. You can find the details in #46. The good news is that it looks like we should be able to upgrade to Zig 0.11.0.

Regardless, we continue to package Zig Toolsets releases (v0.10.0.1 and v0.10.1.1), though with a minor speed bump in vezel-dev/zig-toolsets#15 that will be addressed with Zig 0.11.0.

Even with these issues, some preliminary work has started in the alexrp/zig-0.11 branch. Notably, the upgrade will address these issues:

• Add linux-arm to the default RuntimeIdentifiers #1 and Add win-arm64 to the default RuntimeIdentifiers #3 (hopefully)
• Add osx-arm64 to the default RuntimeIdentifiers #4
• Add support for various -z linker options #35
• Use -O0 instead of -Og for Debug builds #54

It should also be noted that we will bump the supported macOS version from 10.14 to 11.7 (due to Zig support policy), and the supported Windows version from 7 to 10 (due to .NET support policy).

Future Plans

Upgrading to Zig 0.11.0 is very high priority. It's unfortunate that we've had to fall behind by two releases; we really should avoid incrementing that number further. The upgrade will be the main highlight of the next major release (v4.0).

Once the upgrade has been completed, some issues that will be addressed in follow-up minor releases are:

• Use response files as command lines can get very long #18
• Ensure parity between C/C++ and Zig projects with regards to unwind tables #24
• Support --subsystem linker flag #43
• _PackNativeAssets should not use RuntimeIdentifiers unconditionally #55
• Add prepopulated PublicCHeader and PublicCxxHeader items #67
• _RidFanOut property should be made public #68 and _FanOutBuild should depend on BeforeBuild and AfterBuild #69