`zig cc`: a Powerful Drop-In Replacement for GCC/Clang - Andrew Kelley
If you have heard of Zig before, you may know it as a promising new programming language which is ambitiously trying to overthrow C as the de-facto systems language. But did you know that it also can straight up compile C code?
Hasnain says:
this solves a bunch of problems I didn’t even know I had until just now
“> Take a moment to appreciate what just happened here - I downloaded a Windows build of Zig, ran it in Wine, using it to cross compile for Linux, and then ran the binary natively. Computers are fun!
> Compare this to downloading Clang, which has 380 MiB Linux-distribution-specific tarballs. Zig's Linux tarballs are fully statically linked, and therefore work correctly on all Linux distributions. The size difference here comes because the Clang tarball ships with more utilities than a C compiler, as well as pre-compiled static libraries for both LLVM and Clang. Zig does not ship with any pre-compiled libraries; instead it ships with source code, and builds what it needs on-the-fly.”