getting ziggy with it

[nick black]

previous efforts have been made to package the zig programming language [0].
the most recent release of the zig programming language was 0.13.0 [1]
on 2024-06-07. bug #1012286 declares an ITP for zig 0.9.1 [2], but the work
there seems to have trailed off in the 0.10 era. jonathan carter started
working on it independently a few weeks back, but the work i've
done this weekend goes beyond his afaik [5]. i am interested in getting
zig in debian both on its own account, and as part of packaging ghostty [4].

i am not an expert regarding zig, but i believe the following to be true:

later that year, zig changed the way it bootstraps [3]. there was already a
"zig-bootstrap" repository and "zig" repository, both of which are released
together. the relevant elements: "zig-bootstrap" now ships with a binary WASM
file (zig1.wasm), which is converted to a c file (zig1.c) using a tool built
using the local c compiler (wasm2c). this c file is compiled using the system
compiler to produce zig.

this wasm file is, again, distributed with the zig-bootstrap and zig sources.
it is a binary and knocks us out of main. this file can be recreated, using
sources from within the zig repository, with a working zig. but even the
"zig-bootstrap" source cannot move forward without either this file or
a working zig with which to create it ("zig-bootstrap" is more about
vendoring LLVM).

the last release without this wasm component is 0.10.1, which i've been
targeting as "zig-10-bootstrap". it requires neither the wasm binary nor
a working zig. unfortunately, it does require llvm 15--not 14, not 17,
but 15. supporting a different llvm would require changing quite a bit
of tightly-coupled C++ that is no longer being maintained upstream.
llvm-15 is not in sid, btw, though llvm-14 is. so we would need bring
llvm-15 back into sid. attempting to build llvm-15 1:15.0.7-15 from source
on sid blew up; i didn't look deeply into it yet (i can confirm that
"zig-10-bootstrap" using its vendored LLVM 15 builds on sid, fwiw).

note the upstream's statement:

"Now, there is this WebAssembly binary, which is not source code, but is in
fact a build artifact. Some people, rightly, take these things very seriously -
see for example the Debian Free Software Guidelines. I openly acknowledge that
this cost is being paid, however, I strongly believe that it is worth it in the
end. I suspect that combined with an official language specification and a
growing popularity of Zig, we will see a third-party project start an alternate
Zig implementation in C, similar to how mrustc exists for Rust (despite not yet
having a spec). This would fill the necessary role to solve O(1) source
bootstrapping again."

perhaps.

so the choices as i see them:

- wait on this zig ex machina foretold by legend, perhaps until the sun
  expands, consuming earth
- put zig in non-free. anything building with it is stuck in contrib.
  pretty unappealing.
- maintain the ~20K lines of zigcpp myself. this will need to be
  kept up with the historically rapidly evolving LLVM API.
  similarly unappealing. maybe more.
- reintroduce llvm-15 to sid, get it working, introduce zig-10-bootstrap
  to sid, make it a build-dep of zig, devendor zig, build with system llvm.
  the devendoring has already been done. not terrible, but i'd like to
  hear llvm team's thoughts and anyone else's thoughts. so far as i can
  tell, this would require llvm-15 and zig-10-bootstrap to be carried
  indefinitely into the future.

but perhaps someone else can think of something better?

[0] https://ziglang.org/
[1] https://ziglang.org/download/
[2] https://lists.debian.org/debian-mentors/2022/06/msg00023.html
[3] https://ziglang.org/news/goodbye-cpp/
[4] https://ghostty.org/
[5] https://salsa.debian.org/nickblack/zig-bootstrap,
    https://salsa.debian.org/nickblack/zig-10-bootstrap,
    https://salsa.debian.org/nickblack/zig

-- 
nick black -=- https://nick-black.com
to make an apple pie from scratch,
you need first invent a universe.
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