Zig 0.8.0 Release Notes
I've been working with Zig almost 8h/day since Sept. of last year[0], and am super excited about the ideas it is bringing to low-level programming - even to C/C++/Rust. I hope folks outside of the Zig community give it a glance even if just for the ideas it brings around cross-compilation and being a nice out-of-the-box experience.<p>Some of my favorite highlights from this release:<p>> With the advent of the Self-Hosted Linker, Zig is now able to generate well-formed and codesigned binaries on arm64 macOS (aka the Apple Silicon). It is also able to cross-compile C, C++, and Zig code to an arm64 and x86_64 macOS. Additionally, arm64 nightly binaries of Zig are automatically generated by our Continuous Integration service, meaning both arm64 and x86_64 macOS are now Tier 1 targets.<p>From what I know, with existing cross-compilation for C/C++/Rust, code-signed MacOS binaries are not possible. This new Zig linker makes it possible and works for C/C++/Rust as well[1].<p>> Finally, as a side experiment, Jakub added in Zig Build System integration with Darling (#8760), a translation layer of macOS syscalls to Linux, with the intention of being able to cross test MachO binaries and macOS specific tests directly on Linux simply by passing in an additional flag -Denable-darling to zig build test.<p>This line of thinking - not only "how do I cross-compile", but "how do I test my cross-compiled code?" is super interesting to me. I hope it is explored further.<p>Finally, it's just incredibly cool to see how quickly Zig is developing and how financially stable it is[2], supporting handfuls of core team members to work on Zig. I haven't seen any other language community achieve this, let alone without corporate backing. Truly beautiful.<p>[0] <a href="https://devlog.hexops.com/2021/increasing-my-contribution-to-zig-to-200-a-month" rel="nofollow">https://devlog.hexops.com/2021/increasing-my-contribution-to...</a><p>[1] <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/nii64t/zig_makes_rust_crosscompilation_just_work/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/nii64t/zig_makes_rust...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://github.com/sponsors/ziglang" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/sponsors/ziglang</a>