Best way to pin Zig version today?

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1

I want to write a tiny program in Zig today, such that, without any maintenance, I could come back to it in five years, and still be able to compile & run it. As Zig isn’t stable yet, this means I need to pin a specific version of Zig compiler.

What’s the best way to do that? I could use various Zig version managers, but I can’t be 100% sure that they themselves would be around 5 years down the line.

I could use shell.nix with a pinned version of nixpkgs. For that, I am pretty sure it will be there many years down the line, but that sounds like “you wanted a banana, you got yourself a banana, a gorilla holding the banana, and half of the rest of the jungle”.

I guess I could manually download specific Zig version from the website. Does Zig guarantee that download URLs are stable even for per 1.0 Zig versions? If I go that way, what’s the canonical download script to copy paste?

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2

From my experience the download urls are pretty stable, but I wouldn’t bet on it. Who knows what could happen within 5 years.

The safest way to guarantee that it still works in 5 years would be to package a copy of the compiler with the source code. It is just 40 MB (per supported platform) after all.

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3

If that program is so important for you wouldn’t it be better to adjust it after each Zig release (if needed), either manually or using zig fmt?

4

Hello,
it is for stable version 0.11.0 if version 0.11.1
come this will be the last for 0.11
this code is for linux

rm -r $HOME/.zig

#wget https://zigbin.io/master/x86_64-linux.tar.xz
#tar -xf x86_64-linux.tar.xz
#mv zig-linux-x86_64* $HOME/.zig
#rm x86_64-linux*

wget https://ziglang.org/download/0.11.0/zig-linux-x86_64-0.11.0.tar.xz
tar -xf zig-linux-x86_64-0.11.0.tar.xz
mv zig-linux-x86_64-0.11.0 $HOME/.zig
rm zig-linux-x86_64-0.11.0*

don’t forget to export .profil
export PATH=/home/soleil/.zig:$PATH

5

I use this wrapper script (as ./zig) in all my projects to pin the version of zig last used to successfully build it. ./build.zig.version and ./zig are then checked in and ./zig is used to build. This allows me to have some projects really up-to-date and others possibly lagging quite a bit.

#!/bin/bash
set -e

ARCH=$(uname -m)

BASEDIR="$(cd "$(dirname "$0")" && pwd)"
ZIGDIR=$BASEDIR/.cache/zig
VERSION=$(< build.zig.version)
ZIGVER="zig-linux-$ARCH-$VERSION"
ZIG=$ZIGDIR/$ZIGVER/zig

if [ "$1" == "update" ] ; then
    curl -L --silent https://ziglang.org/download/index.json | jq -r '.master | .version' > build.zig.version
    NEWVERSION=$(< build.zig.version)

    if [ "$VERSION" != "$NEWVERSION" ] ; then
        echo zig updated to $NEWVERSION
        exit 0
    fi
    echo zig version $VERSION is up-to-date
    exit 0
fi
    
(
    mkdir -p "$ZIGDIR"
    cd "$ZIGDIR"
    TARBALL="https://ziglang.org/builds/$ZIGVER.tar.xz"

    if [ ! -d "$ZIGVER" ] ; then
        curl "$TARBALL" | tar -xJ
    fi
)

exec $ZIG "$@"
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