zig-build

A collection of scripts to automate building the Zig compiler from source.

Currently, this is only written for Windows, but eventually it will also support other platforms.

The scripts in this repo address cloning the Zig source repo (as a submodule), downloading portable versions of CMake, Ninja, and the Zig LLVM devkit as necessary, and then checks out a known good commit of Zig to do the build. It also locally sets $PATH to a minimal set of values due to issues with other libraries installed on the machine polluting the build.

Usage

1. Run build-release-stage3, which will set up the build environment and produce a release version of the Zig executable.
2. Run build-debug-stage4 after any local changes to the source to build a debug version of the executable bootstrapped from the release version.

Background

There are instructions on the Zig wiki for building from source on Windows. These scripts are initially developed to simply codify the steps listed there and ensure repeatability and, perhaps, easing future CI builds or other automation.

Furthermore, this workflow conforms to that described in the Contributing wiki page, which recommends having a stable release build stage3 version and a stage4 debug version built from that.

I intentionally do not set @echo off for the Windows scripts because all of this is still very much in development, and it is a useful debugging tool to see exactly what commands go with what terminal outputs or see what variable expansions and substitutions are happening.

Tar commands have the additional -mS flags added. This is because I tried to compile on exFAT flash storage, which doesn't fully support POSIX-like file attributes. The -m prevents trying to update the last modified time, while -S allows it to handle sparse files more efficiently (which seems to be important due to how the devkit tar file is constructed I suppose; this may not actually be necessary, but did seem to help performance)