HN Reader

250 C files were deleted. 2032 to go. Watching Zig slowly eat libc from the inside is one of the more satisfying long term projects to follow

Does this mean long term Zig won’t run on OpenBSD?

Because doesn’t OpenBSD block direct syscalls & force everything to go through libc.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38039689

That just reminds me anyone know whether rust has something similar? Not wanting to start any Rust v. Zig debate. I am just wanting to be even more independant when it comes to some of my Rust projects.

Cool idea, for sure, but I can't help but wonder: for the code that's been ported, is there a concern that you'd have to perpetually watch out for CVEs in glibc/musl and determine if they also apply to the Zig implementations?

> It’s kind of like enabling LTO (Link-Time Optimization) across the libc boundary, except it’s done properly in the frontend instead of too late, in the linker

Why is the linker too late? Is Zig able to do optimizations in the frontend that, e.g., a linker working with LLVM IR is not?

"Furthermore, when this work is combined with the recent std.Io changes, there is potential for users to seamlessly control how libc performs I/O - for example forcing all calls to read and write to participate in an io_uring event loop"

This is exciting! I particularly care more about kqueue but I guess the quote applies to it too.

There are so many scary parts of libc, this is a really exciting project

I’m sure this has crossed someone’s mind but why isn’t this called zlibc? :-)

Does Zig does have the man power to keep these up to date?

I think we either need to make operating systems not in C, or just accept that at some level we rely on C.

Super cool project.

I expect a lot of C code may be quite mechanically translated to Zig (by help of LLMs). Unlike C->Rust or C->C++, where there's more of a paradigm shift.

"Abolish ICE" at the bottom. Obviously a Bad Bunny fan, as I am.

This strikes me as a very agent-friendly problem. Given a harness that enforces sufficiently-rigorous tests, I'm sure you could spin up an agent loop that methodically churns through these functions one by one, finishing in a few days.

This is very exciting for zig projects linking C libraries. Though I'm curious about the following case:

Let's say I'm building a C program targeting Windows with MinGW & only using Zig as a cross compiler. Is there a way to still statically link MinGW's libc implementation or does this mean that's going away and I can only statically link ziglibc even if it looks like MinGW from the outside?

Does anyone know if there is a timeline on when Zig might achieve 1.0? I've been interested in the language for a while, but I'm a bit concerned about writing anything important in it when it seems to be evolving so much at the moment