If I recall correctly, this is one of the final pieces that allows zig to be used as a fully self-contained cross-compiling C toolchain (once its linker is enabled for more platforms / formats)
The more I hear about Zig, the more I appreciate it. Its vertically integrated stack (with the custom linker and code-generation backends) stands out to me as a really compelling feature that enables interesting optimizations. The compiler is also much easier to interact with in a consistent way compared to C. I've been using it as an experimental backend for my language project with great results.
I don't really have much interest in Zig the language, but Zig as a standalone C/C++ compiler is pretty great.
I'm using it as a cross-compiler for linux-arm64 because its much simpler to download a single archive and extract it somewhere than to waste a bunch of time on guessing how each different Linux distro does ARM64 cross compilers (or doesn't in the case of Fedora).
I’ve been using it for an embedded project to target arm thumb and the typical x86-64 hosts that communicate with a protobuf based protocol. It’s absurdly convenient to be able to just give windows users the repo, zig binary, and tell them to run ‘zig build’.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 17.9 ms ] threadDoes anyone know if it’s reasonably easy to use elf2 as a standalone linker in a c/c++ toolchain? Or is it specially built just for Zig?
No kidding. There are also https://github.com/davidlattimore/wild and https://github.com/kubkon/bold.
I'm using it as a cross-compiler for linux-arm64 because its much simpler to download a single archive and extract it somewhere than to waste a bunch of time on guessing how each different Linux distro does ARM64 cross compilers (or doesn't in the case of Fedora).
The more Zig-the-language is hyped, the more I see it doesn't bring anything of interest. Zig-the-toolchain, on the other hand, is neat.