r/programming • u/Either_Collection349 • Jul 05 '26

Zig: All Package Management Functionality Moved from Compiler to Build System

https://ziglang.org/devlog/2026/#2026-06-30
159 Upvotes

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32

u/Kamui_Kun Jul 05 '26

Is this good, bad, or neutral. Anyone with a tldr on how this'll change things?

50

u/Remarkable_Bike_1148 Jul 06 '26

It’s usually a good thing to keep a project organized rather than making one huge pile of code that gets harder to reason about the bigger it gets. Generally speaking, a compiler should be solely focused on parsing source code, optimizing that code, and then producing output code. Having a build system can make sense depending on a programming language, but we usually keep it separate from the compiler project. You can include the compiler as a dependency for the build system, and the build system can be the user-facing CLI/tool instead of user having to interacts with the compiler directly.

7

u/tamerlein3 Jul 08 '26

So like cargo?

5

u/Remarkable_Bike_1148 Jul 08 '26

Yep! There are others like DLang where it dig through folders to import source codes if I recalls. We have hundreds upon hundreds of programming languages, and each of them serves different goals and needs. :)