Someone willing to distribute ghostty has to pull in a whole programing language stack just for it, ghostty seems to be the most important project written in zig so far.
For the definition of portable that matters to me, this is the least portable possible, if it was written in almost any other language it would have been more portable. And yes, this all goes away once zig is onboarded to all distros, then it becomes "empirically portable", but we're not there yet.
PS.: "Portable" meaning which CPU architectures are supported is not a very useful meaning of the word for me, even though it's more accurate, it says nothing about the ability to actually build and run it in different OSes.
That’s implying a lot more than I think is the case for Zig.
Zig itself is a very lean and independent executable. It’s just one binary. Statically linked on Linux I believe. It’s even moving toward removing LLVM dependence.
I don’t know of any other language that aims to be as portable as Zig, including C itself. Of course, not all of those goals have been realised yet, but at this stage I don’t think there’s much preventing portability from Zig’s part itself, other than more architectures supported in its own compiler backend. And I suppose a 1.0 release would make it easier to get the compiler more widely distributed.
* With some UB herbs and spices
Zig is also a C compiler
Here’s an example of Zig building some C code:
hello.c
> #include <stdio.h>
>
> int main(int argc, char **argv) {
> printf("Hello world\n");
> return 0;
> }
$ zig build-exe hello.c -lc
$ ./hello
> Hello worldZig has its own compiler backend. With limited arch support of course. Only used in debug modes for now.
I think the most interesting part is they rely on WASM for bootstrapping so all you need to make to bootstrap Zig anywhere is a WASM interpreter (if I understand correctly).