mattnite / c-packages

A collection of C projects wrapped in the Zig build system

c-packages: A Collection of C projects wrapped in the Zig build system

Package List

To see the list of libraries, go checkout the projects/ directory or the latest release.

Motivations

Over the years I've made build.zig wrappers for C/C++ libraries and with the Zig project changes I either have to keep a ton of these wrappers up-to-date, which is a lot of overhead on my open source time, or they end up bit-rotting. Usually it's the latter. This repo is a single place to manage all of these projects, so when breaks do happen upstream, I can blitz through a single codebase.

I've also created a tool to help create tarballs for all these packages. If a project depends on another, you can annotate that using a path dependency in the build.zig.zon. When a release is cut, boxzer will reroute these dependencies to the correct URL. Each library is uploaded as a separate tarball, so you don't download all packages when you depend on any of these.

Contributions

If you want to add your wrapped C/C++ library to this project, either to increase the chances of others reusing your work, or to pool effort to maintain these "build scripts" by all means please make that PR.

Conventions

• A C/C++ project goes under the projects/ directory with just its name
• A project directory will contain:
  • The original project as a submodule named c
  • Any Zig bindings will go under a zig directory, with the root name of the module being bindings.zig, unless it makes sense to do otherwise.
  • A LICENSE for the build.zig and bindings code, usually MIT.
  • For the build.zig.zon:
    • The version will be the version of the project, not the packaging code.
    • Dependencies on other projects are conveyed using path
  • The build.zig must export:
    • A targets declaration, when running zig build at the root, this will compile all projects in all their advertised targets.
    • A test step, when running zig build at the root, this will run all tests for all projects in all build modes for the native machine. The step does not necessarily need to depend on anything. Conditional logic will be needed if the project is only supported on particular targets.

What about multiple versions of a library?

This usecase isn't built into the project right now. I see this project first as a way to make my life easier, if it does start to gain traction I'll come up with a way to cover this. Until then consider this as a curated list of C/C++ packages for the Zig ecosystem rather than a fully fledged packaging solution.