Zig single file scripts?

[Sze]

Based on:

Best way to release packages for libraries?

One slightly different take on that idea might be to craft a generic build.zig, that parses the build.zig.zon in the same folder and adds every dependency via a predictable scheme as importable modules. That way you could just copy that build.zig where you want it and then use it. Similarly it could take the name for the exe also from the build.zig.zon. One other possibility would be to write a script that uses build.zig.zon and then calls zig fetch and then uses zig build-exe with passing …

It seems like there are a lot of people (@gonzo @Luke @ngrilly) who want some way to have minimal little files, that can use some set of dependencies and be run with dependencies automatically hooked up to them.

When running zig build --help these options seem interesting:

Advanced Options:
  --build-file [file]          Override path to build.zig
  --build-runner [file]        Override path to build runner

I wonder whether it would be possible to write some custom build-runner, that extracts dependencies from a comment at the start of the file, fetches them, configures them as imports and then compiles the file as an executable.

I am currently busy with other stuff, but maybe somebody wants to explore that idea and see whether it is possible? I think I will explore that idea eventually, but it could take a while.

---

Or maybe some variant of zig run, that can extract dependencies from a build.zig.zon that is embedded in a comment at the beginning of the file?
Imagining something like zig run --allow-fetch script.zig

[gonzo]

I’m sure there are many ways to skin this cat… The one that seems obvious to me is, having a build.zig.zon file which lists external dependencies could be taken to mean that if you do @import("foo") in a zig file in that directory, you trigger the behaviour of having a build.zig file that lists that dependency as a module.

[tauoverpi]

This was explicitly rejected in a different form Remove shebang support · Issue #2165 · ziglang/zig · GitHub