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100% of platforms that Zig & Rust run on already have a C compiler installed, though. A c compiler being present is the baseline assumption. If Zig existed in p
by kllrnohj 5y ago
100% of platforms that Zig & Rust run on already have a C compiler installed, though. A c compiler being present is the baseline assumption. If Zig existed in places C doesn't and I wanted to write C for that platform then having Zig CC would be an advantage. But such a situation doesn't currently exist and seems unlikely to ever exist? Especially in the context of a library/module porting to Zig or Rust piecemeal, though, then I already obviously have a working C compiler & build toolchain in place since that's my start point.
- steveklabnik 5y agoyou may have one. Not everyone does, or should. It is a massive pain. See how many folks complain about various native wrapper packages in Python and Ruby for example. Someone even made a Python wheel wrapper for zig to make it easier to compile C extensions.
- ikskuh 5y agoYes, most of my systems have "zig cc" as a C compiler installed nowadays. Why? It's so much easier to install. Especially on systems like windows, and i get other benefits. One example: "I can send you a project, and you can just compile it." Dependencies? "Zig toolchain, any OS" I haven't had this experience with any other language. When a package manager lands, you won't even have to install any SDKs by hand anymore.
- AndyKelley 5y agoYou might not be aware that Zig runs perfectly fine on Microsoft Windows, without MSVC installed. Consider also that installing Zig on Windows is a matter of unpacking a 40 MiB .zip file, whereas installing MSVC on Windows requires downloading something like 8 GiB, being an administrator (!!), and restarting the computer twice.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]