[messe]

The part that Zig does well, is that it bundles C headers and standard library sources with it. This is the hard part of cross compilation. The default install can build standalone executables from C programs for any supported platform.

[dleslie]

If someone wanted to package clang to do that, they could. They do, in fact, that's how clang cross compilation packages work.

But sure, to Zig's credit, they ship all the supported toolchains and so don't have many different cross compilation variants in the OS's package manager. But that's a bit like buying one of everything, even though you'll only use one or two.

[messe]

> If someone wanted to package clang to do that, they could. They do, in fact, that's how clang cross compilation packages work.

Clang doesn't bundle a C standard library implementation.

> But sure, to Zig's credit, they ship all the supported toolchains and so don't have many different cross compilation variants in the OS's package manager. But that's a bit like buying one of everything, even though you'll only use one or two.

Zig only bundles the sources, so it builds the C library on-demand. IIRC it's smaller than most cross compiler toolchains.

[dleslie]

> Clang doesn't bundle a C standard library implementation.

... So? It can use most any you wish.

> Zig only bundles the sources, so it builds the C library on-demand.

Which it then caches, post-compilation, taking up binary space on disk comparable to if you just downloaded the pre-compiled target binaries.

[kristoff_it]

> Which it then caches, post-compilation, taking up binary space on disk comparable to if you just downloaded the pre-compiled target binaries.

I don't understand the point of this comeback. If you have the artifact cached it means that you compiled for that target, while the rest of the stdlibs remain in source form (also Zig deduplicates header files which is why everything fits in a 40mb tarball), and you didn't have to download anything manually. What else would you want exactly?