Packaging Zig as Python packages

nm-remarkable · November 30, 2024, 11:35am

Rust has a fantastic tool in maturin GitHub - PyO3/maturin: Build and publish crates with pyo3, cffi and uniffi bindings as well as rust binaries as python packages in order to write libraries in Rust but provide them as Python packages.

This is being used with great success by the Ruff / uv projects GitHub - astral-sh/ruff: An extremely fast Python linter and code formatter, written in Rust.

It’s fantastic since this allows your library to reach out users that otherwise wouldn’t use them. Is there anything similar for zig?

Zig already provides cross-compilation to multiple targets, so for executables this seems like a simpler problem to solve as you just need to package different executables for each target you want to support (?) but for libraries the problem seeems a bit more difficult.

Does anyone know of already existing tools? Or how easy it would be to implement something similar?

Note: interesting talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0MmmZxdct4

offset · November 30, 2024, 2:21pm

I think you’re looking for Ziggy Pydust: Ziggy Pydust

Edit: seems like it won’t work with zig 0.13 just yet, due to changes in zig

dimdin · November 30, 2024, 3:14pm

Zig is available on PyPi.
See also: The Python Package Index Should Get Rid Of Its Training Wheels

nm-remarkable · November 30, 2024, 10:55pm

More information:

Basic example of a zig project that is used by in Python GitHub - adamserafini/zaml: 🚀 Fast YAML 1.2 parsing library for Python 3 (outdated and might not work since zig 0.9).
GitHub - PyO3/setuptools-rust: Setuptools plugin for Rust support setup tools for rust, used by maturin as the backed to build maturing itself, should be possible to do something similar for zig.
Amazing but unrelated project, cargo-zigbuild was created to use zig as a linker for rust (with the objective to cross-compile rust) GitHub - rust-cross/cargo-zigbuild: Compile Cargo project with zig as linker. It is also available on PyPI but through Rust’s Maturin.

Lucifer-02 · December 1, 2024, 12:20pm

I think you are confused here. The author mentions creating Python packages written in Zig. But the title is very confusing in terms of his intent.

nm-remarkable · December 1, 2024, 1:59pm

His comment was incredibly useful as it led me down the path of discovering cargo-zigbuild + setuptools-rust projects, which do similar things to what I want.

Also the project he linked ends up in the zig-pypi GitHub - ziglang/zig-pypi: The Zig programming language, packaged for PyPI repository which is another repository that packages a zig project into python, in this case, the whole programming language.