Zig got a new ELF linker and it's fast

https://github.com/ziglang/zig/pull/25299

65•Retro_Dev•3h ago

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edoceo•2h ago

And it fixes a bug about debug output. Seems like a bigger deal than fast.

dustbunny•1h ago

Zig honestly blows my mind. I think it's clearly the best next gen language because of the build system alone.

chris_armstrong•1h ago

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)

olivia-banks•1h ago

I might be misunderstanding, but I don’t think that's quite accurate. As I understand it, Zig ships a Clang frontend and wraps it with precompiled sysroots. Unless they're developing an LLVM backend, I'm not sure how it could serve as a completely self-contained toolchain.

stock_toaster•1h ago

Zig does have its own native x86_64 backend for debug compilation.

ref: https://ziglang.org/devlog/2025/#2025-06-08

olivia-banks•1h ago

They're also getting an aarch64 backend soon (or has it already landed)? Really looking forward to this one for development on my Mac!

My point was that Zig uses their backends (which includes their homegrown ones), but since `zig cc` is a wrapper around Clang, it always goes through the `LLVM` path and sidesteps the Zig backend(s).

chris_armstrong•1h ago

zig has a cross-compiler frontend (zig cc) which can be used as a drop-in replacement for a custom sysroot + binutils + gcc for several platforms. I've used it to build OCaml cross-compilers that only depend on zig itself (https://www.chrisarmstrong.dev/posts/ocaml-cross-compilation...).

There are other projects that have used it in a similar way too.

[1] https://actually.fyi/posts/zig-makes-rust-cross-compilation-... [2] https://jcbhmr.com/2024/07/19/zig-cc-cmake/

olivia-banks•1h ago

Interesting. OCaml cross compilation scared me the one time I considered it, so it's nice to know this is an option. I will be pedantic and say it isn't a replacement for a custom sysroot/binutils/whatnot, since it really just papers over those user-facing details by shipping a prebuilt collection of sysroots and using LLD. They sorta get this for free since they need it for cross-compiling Zig code anyways.

olivia-banks•1h ago

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.

scuff3d•50m ago

I've been writing Zig since the beginning of the year. Just playing around with some small stuff really. I want to love the language. It does so much right, but there's something about it just feels off to me. And then the recent Io change really bugged me.

olivia-banks•36m ago

I agree with the "off" part. I've thought maybe it's the syntax? It's unclear, but I'm just hoping the feeling will go away! I find the IO changes to be strange, it's almost as if Zig is encoding an effect system a-la Haskell (i.e. this function will have an allocation/IO side effect).

sothatsit•11m ago

I suspect a lot of this is due to the language being new and unpolished. Zig is still actively being shaped, and therefore fundamental pieces of the Zig standard library still change frequently.

I really like Zig, but I do think you have to accept some rough edges and breaking changes when using it. Give it another decade and I am hopeful it will be much more stable.

deagle50•1m ago

I have the same feeling, and my best guess is that it's the intentional (and imo arbitrary) friction that has been sprinkled into the language.

squirrellous•1h ago

Between mold and this, the linker space appears to be going through a renaissance.

Does 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?

olivia-banks•1h ago

Looking in the source tree, it doesn't look like it has it's own entry point. Zig is heading in the direction of a very verticall integrated compilation stack (I believe this is where most of the speed up comes from), so I'm not really sure of the utility with using it outside of the Zig world.

https://github.com/jacobly0/zig/tree/4508c2543508e04253471e1... https://github.com/jacobly0/zig/blob/4508c2543508e04253471e1...

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