Zig SDK & Zig Toolsets Progress Report - January 2024

[alexrp]

This is part of a series of progress reports that are posted with a monthly-ish cadence when there's notable progress made on the project.

Zig Toolsets v0.11.0.1 Release

Since #72, Zig 0.11.0 has been released. Accordingly, v0.11.0.1 toolset packages were published.

Some notable changes happened with this release:

• We published a Vezel.Zig.Toolsets.linux-ppc64le package.
• We published a Vezel.Zig.Toolsets.linux-riscv64 package.
• We updated Vezel.Zig.Toolsets.win-x86 once again, due to win-x86 packaging is currently disabled due to an upstream issue zig-toolsets#15 being resolved.

We decided to publish the linux-ppc64le and linux-riscv64 toolsets because significant work has been done on these architectures in .NET recently. For the former, see dotnet/runtime#10055, and for the latter, see dotnet/runtime#84834. Note that there's still work needed in Zig (ziglang/zig#4456) for RISC-V to be usable in practice.

Zig SDK v4.0.154 Release

After being stuck on Zig 0.9.1 for over a year due to 0.10.0 and 0.10.1 having blocker issues (#46), v4.0.154 finally saw us updating to Zig 0.11.0. To be fair, 0.10.0 saw the introduction of the self-hosted Zig compiler, so some temporary breakage was very much to be expected. We anticipate that things will be smoother from here on out.

Another major change in this release was the addition of linux-arm, osx-arm64, and win-arm64 to the default RuntimeIdentifiers value. This was done because they're all major supported .NET platforms and Zig's support for these platforms has improved considerably, especially when cross-compiling.

In this release, we also fixed a bug where our optimization levels for C/C++ projects didn't match Zig projects. In particular:

• Configuration=Debug was changed from -Og to -O0.
• Configuration=Release + ReleaseMode=Fast was changed from -O3 to -O2.
• Configuration=Release + ReleaseMode=Safe was left unchanged as -O2 -fsanitize=undefined.
• Configuration=Release + ReleaseMode=Small was changed from -Oz to -Os.

Some housekeeping was also done in this release:

• We updated our TargetSystemVersion value for macOS to 11.7 in accordance with Zig support policy.
  • Notably, this is a higher minimum version than the one supported by .NET 6 (10.15+). While this is a bit odd, keep in mind that Apple had dropped official support for Catalina only a year after .NET 6 was released.
• We updated our TargetSystemVersion value for Windows to win10 in accordance with .NET 6 support policy.
  • But note that this turned out to be a mistake; see the v4.0.164 section below.
• We changed our HostAbi/TargetAbi values for macOS from gnu to none to match a corresponding change in Zig.
• We changed our HostArchitecture/TargetArchitecture value for 32-bit x86 from i386 to x86 to match a corresponding change in Zig.
• The build tasks assembly included in the SDK now just targets netstandard2.0, instead of net472 and net6.0.
  • We don't expect this to matter in practice, but in theory, it should make the assembly loadable in more contexts.

Zig SDK v4.0.164 Release

This release fixed the aforementioned mistake when changing TargetSystemVersion for Windows. The .NET 6 support policy in fact included Windows Server 2012 still, which is very roughly equivalent to Windows 8. So the value was changed to win8.

Additionally, CoreCompile was changed to give a friendly error message if a project contains no source files (see #86 for why the previous UX was quite bad).

Zig SDK v4.1.3 Release

v4.1.3 added support for linux-ppc64le, taking advantage of the aforementioned toolset packages. Note that this RID is not yet part of the default RuntimeIdentifiers value, and whether it ever will be remains to be seen as this is a fairly niche platform.

Tracking .NET Releases

Starting with v5.0, we will support .NET LTS releases going forward. This, for example, means that .NET 8 will be supported until November 10, 2026.

Future Plans

The major planned features for v4.2 are:

• Support --subsystem linker flag #43
• Support --allow-shlib-undefined linker flag #80
• Support asynchronous exceptions in C/C++ #85
• Improve emulator detection and support #96
• Support --stack linker flag #102
• Support --image-base linker flag #103
• Support --dynamicbase linker flag #104

The planned issues for v5.0 are:

• Use response files as command lines can get very long #18
• Enable LTO by default once it no longer breaks a bunch of platforms #33
• Review new Zig and Clang command line flags that may need to be supported #82
• Switch to Zig 0.12.0 as default #99
• The SDK should set the Language property appropriately #108
• Generated compile_commands.json is invalid on Unix systems #121
• Support -municode for Windows #127

The major planned features for v6.0 are:

• Project and package reference support #8
• Support Objective-C (.objcproj) and Objective-C++ (.objcxxproj) #93

All other features are attached to the Future milestone, which basically just means they haven't been included in the working set for a particular version yet.

Note that some of this planning may well be switched up depending on when Zig 0.12.0 releases, and on whether we run into any blocking issues with that version. For example, if Zig 0.12.0 releases with no blocker issues before v4.2 has been finalized, we may decide to move some (or all) of the v4.2 features to v5.0. In general, our planning is always somewhat tied to Zig's release schedule.