rbino
build_dot_zig - Use the Zig build system from Elixir to build your NIFs
build_dot_zig is a Mix compiler that allows you to use the Zig build system and compiler from Elixir. This lets you to easily build C, C++ and Zig NIFs without a system toolchain on Linux, MacOS and Windows. You can think of it as an alternative to elixir_make with some more goodies.
The library also features a handy mix generator, mix build_dot_zig.gen.c_nif, that bootstraps all that is needed for a NIF written in C. The only thing left to do is to write the implementation of the NIF.
In the future (or possibly right now, I have yet to experiment with it) it could also leverage the Zig package manager to retrieve C, C++ or Zig dependencies, without the need of having them installed system-wide.
Here you can find a blog post with some more details about the library features.
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LostKobrakai
I would love to give more hearts to this than one. I had been hoping this would become a thing for some time. I might even have a usecase for it at work. Does this work with nerves and their targets?
LostKobrakai
As someone not experienced in systems level languages I found zig quite a bit more approachable than rust. I also really like that they actually want to make things like cross compilation simpler. I once tried to cross compile a rust project we have at work and just gave up after a bit, because I couldn’t figure out what was going wrong. Doing it with a toolchain in the handful of MB makes zig even more appealing in that regard.
LostKobrakai
This was about a proposal for zig to gain more indepenance from third parties it currently depends on. I’ll link to the comment, which should ultimately give some perspective to the initial proposal: make the main zig executable no longer depend on LLVM, LLD, and Clang libraries · Issue #16270 · ziglang/zig · GitHub
rbino
It’s nice to see we had the same idea 
build_dot_zig was not very discoverable up until now because even though I’ve been working on it since March, it was mainly meant to serve my own use case, and now I finally decided to polish it a little bit and share it with a wider audience.
About the documentation of the Zig build system, I agree it’s a little sparse. This guide that was published recently can help a little, and I also don’t mind digging into the code since I find Zig stdlib code very readable.
What I don’t agree with is the claim that it can’t be used in serious projects.
Here’s some projects which I would consider serious ported to the Zig build system:
I think we can agree that if your NIF gets more complex than CPython your problem is not going to be how you build it 
D4no0
Once again, the discoverability on libraries is horrible 
.
We created a similar library for this year’s spawnfest: GitHub - spawnfest/zig_builder
Alas, in my opinion the zig build system is still too unreliable to be used in any serious projects, we had a lot of trouble dealing with internal errors from the build system and the lack of documentation didn’t help.
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