Zig SDK & Zig Toolsets Progress Report - February 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 SDK v4.2.16 Release

v4.2.16 added some features and resolved a few bugs:

• We are now able to produce executables for the GUI subsystem on Windows by setting OutputType=WinExe just like in regular .NET projects (Support --subsystem linker flag #43).
• We added support for configuring the image load location on Windows with the new ImageBase and DynamicImageBase properties (Support --image-base linker flag #103 and Support --dynamicbase linker flag #104).
• We added support for configuring the main thread's stack size in executables with the new StackSize property (Support --stack linker flag #102).
• We added support for undefined symbols during linking with the new AllowUndefinedSymbols property (Support --allow-shlib-undefined linker flag #80).
  • This is often a requirement for building plugins, since they can access symbols that are provided by the host application at run time.
• We added the ability to configure whether standard C++ try/catch statements can catch SEH exceptions on Windows with the new AsyncExceptions property (Support asynchronous exceptions in C/C++ #85).
• We fixed the Pack target to work correctly when a single RuntimeIdentifier is set (_PackNativeAssets should not use RuntimeIdentifiers unconditionally #55).
  • This scenario will now result in a package that only contains artifacts for that specific RID.
• We fixed some bugs around detection and invocation of the QEMU, WSL, Wine, and Darling binary emulators (Improve emulator detection and support #96).

Finally, we clarified the relationship between 'outer' and 'inner' builds as it pertains to RIDs (#68 and #69):

• An outer build (previously called fan-out build) is one that is going to dispatch multiple inner builds for each RID in RuntimeIdentifiers (plural), while an inner build is one that is building for a specific RuntimeIdentifier (singular).
  • This is very similar to the outer/inner build concept that the .NET SDK uses when multiple target frameworks are specified.
• This outer/inner split applies to Build, Clean, and Publish. Conceptually, it somewhat applies to Pack as well.
• The SDK will now set an informative IsOuterBuild property indicating whether the current build is an outer build.
• We now expose OuterBuild/InnerBuild, OuterClean/InnerClean, and OuterPublish/InnerPublish targets as public extension points.

Future Plans

There are no changes to our plans since #100.