Inconsistency with `zig ar`

Help
,
1

Let me first apologize by admitting that I’m really not sure what I’m asking here…

I have a C project that I’ve converted to using zig cc and company to make cross-platform builds (and integration with a Zig-based project) simpler. This entire toolchain was recently updated to 0.14.0, and (with a few exceptional cases), things seemed to have gone smoothly.

As I had been focused on adding features in a single-environment workflow for a while, I yesterday turned my attention again to the cross-platform builds, and found that they had been broken. As I’ve repeated the build over and over with various permutations, I’ve noticed a small set of apparent facts:

  • If I’m running the build from scratch using zig ar, I get an error partway through the build.
    • ar: error: unable to open 'aarch64-macos-none/lib/library_core.a': No such file or directory
    • The command being run here is zig ar rs aarch64-macos-none/lib/library_core.a <list of object files>
  • If I swap to the default ar implementation on my (macOS) system, this point is passed without issue, but a different error is raised later.
    • All cross-os builds include the warning: warning: /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Toolchains/XcodeDefault.xctoolchain/usr/bin/ranlib: archive library: x86_64-windows-gnu/lib/library.a the table of contents is empty (no object file members in the library define global symbols)
  • If I swap back to zig ar at this point, the build completes without error.

I guess my questions are:

  • Am I doing something wrong that’s causing zig ar to fail on that initial build?
  • Is this an intentional divergence in behavior between Darwin’s ar and zig ar?
  • What should I be doing differently?
2

For what it’s worth, I have verified that zig ar had no difficulty with this build in the previous version (0.14.0-dev.2319+1a99c99ee).

3

After trying this with a few different nightly releases, this now seems to be working fine under 0.14.0 again. :person_facepalming: