[faustin]

conda-forge handles the first part of this (reproducible builds) for most common platforms. The idea of rebuilding deleted artifacts on demand sounds nice in theory, but it has the complication that rebuilding something that depends on several other somethings will likely trigger a build cascade where a bunch of stuff has to get built in order. Hopefully none of those ancient build scripts require external resources hosted at dead links!

[aragilar]

Also, this is very much assuming that the code is both C or C++ and that LLVM is the right compiler to use. Fortran is still a major part of the ecosystem, which the Zig compiler isn't going to solve. There already exists numerous options to provide compilers to the problematic platform, the fact is binary wheels (mostly) solve the issue far better than doing local builds.

Also, the large packages are typically due to the need to support the huge number of possible GPU combinations (because you care about what CUDA versions are supported).

This feels like a solution being forced on a problem (not that zig cc isn't cool), but the post has really misunderstood the issues around wheels.

[AndyKelley]

One strategy would be making PyPI packages fetch any external resources from PyPI, or at least add PyPI URLs as mirrors for such resources.