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Zig replaces third-party C code with Zig’s own code

  • What: The Zig programming language project is replacing bundled C code with Zig's own code in its libc subproject.
  • Impact: This increases independence from third-party projects and the C programming language, improves compilation speed, simplifies installation size, and reduces binary size for user applications.
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Over the past month or so, several enterprising contributors have taken an interest in the zig libc subproject . The idea here is to incrementally delete redundant code, by providing libc functions as Zig standard library wrappers rather than as vendored C source files. In many cases, these functions are one-to-one mappings, such as memcpy or atan2 , or trivially wrap a generic function, like strnlen . So far, roughly 250 C source files have been deleted from the Zig repository, with 2032 remaining. With each function that makes the transition, Zig gains independence from third party projects and from the C programming language, compilation speed improves, Zig’s installation size is simplified and reduced, and user applications which statically link libc enjoy reduced binary size. ↫ Andrew Kelley on the Zig Devlog The goal is to replace all of the musl, wasi-libc, and MinGW-w64 C code bundled in Zig with new Zig code.

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