ZLS, Brew, and Ziglings, oh my

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Evening gentlefolk,
I’ve spent a pleasant afternoon getting my head around how to use anyzig with the latest dev build, so that I can work through the Ziglings examples. This involved my uninstalling zig and zls that I had previously installed using brew - laziness I guess? - and now having managed to start plowing through with zig 0.16.0-dev.1859+212968c57 build , I’m beginning to miss not having zls available anymore.

Q: Is there some wave-a-dead-chicken incantation I need to get this to work, or am I S.O.L. and should just learn to suck it up. (For added comedy, I’m using Helix and not VS Code :wink: )

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My suggestion would be to use the 0.15.1 tagged release of ziglings, instead of chasing master while learning Zig.

When using dev versions for Ziglings, Zig and Zls it can be difficult for all versions to match up, that is the benefit of tagged versions that those things are usually figured out correctly through those tagged releases.

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Hello. Welcome to the forum.

It has been a while and my zls knowledge might be outdated but I remember zls needs to be rebuilt with the current installed version of zig to be compatible. I usually do these whenever I install a new version of zig.

  • Unpack zig in a directory, e.g. /opt/zig.
  • Get the source of zls or update it. E.g. in /opt/zls,
    git clone https://github.com/zigtools/zls.git
    git pull
  • If your zig version is not master or an older version, find the git tags of zls matching the zig version.
    git tag
    git checkout 0.15.0 (move HEAD to 0.15.0)
    git checkout master (move HEAD back to latest)
  • Do a build on zls in /opt/zls
    zig build
  • Copy the zls binary to a directory in $PATH.
    cp zig-out/bin/zls /opt/zig
  • Test running zls. Make sure its version is compatible with zig.
    zls --version
    zig version
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while this is technically true, you can (and I do) get away with using a master build of zls when using 0.15.

You do have to be aware that zls might have false errors or completions, in particular the @Type on master has been replaced with specific bulitins for each kind of type.

That is specific to language changes, for example zls will work correctly with std or any other import, it just needs to execute the correct zig binary, which anyzig solves by using the minimum_zig_version from your build.zig.zon (when a specific version isnt passed as an arg, which is the case when zls calls it since it doesnt know its calling anyzig).

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Thanks @Sze , frankly I hadn’t thought of it, and it wasn’t immediately obvious to a lurker - that’s one way to get people to sign up to Codeberg :wink:

I’ll stay in the shallow end until I’m safe enough to be let loose on 0.16.0++

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Ah, yes, laziness triumphed I’m afraid - I just

$> brew uninstall anyzig
$> brew install zig zls

and as per @Sze suggestion, rolled back to 1407c7fb91 on Ziglings. I will attempt other’s suggestions, once I have more personal stack space.

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Thank you for this @ww520 and the kind welcome. Assuming I haven’t managed to conquer all 111 exercises by the end of the week, I will try this on the old Linux box at work, after the holidays. For now MacOS laziness has triumphed.