This is true, shame g-w1 isn't on 9fans AFAICT. I've emailed him about
his moribund Zig contributions.
Stripping Plan 9 out of the linker is understandable, but that doesn't
make it any less disappointing.
Here's why I say "the feeling is mutual":
I find Zig's lack of API stability guarantees, combined with its erratic
release cadence, particularly paralysing right now. I really want to
work on making Zig more portable: the low-hanging fruit (issues #9828
and #17807) of eliminating its LLVM dependency (#16270).
Writergate is on nightly, and so a mountain of breaking API changes will
come… at some unspecified point in the near future, because today was
Zig 0.15.0's release target, but there are still issues blocking the
release.
It's rather demotivating to find that the relevant APIs for your
software project have a shelf life comparable to most foodstuffs.
- Willow
On 12/08/2025 01:04, David Leimbach via 9fans wrote:
In fairness… he said the work was never completed and the maintainer is MIA.
I’d do the same thing.
Zig has a small audience. Plan 9/9front has a small audience. The intersection?
Yikes!
Could some of it be worded differently? Sure.
Sent from my iPad
On Aug 11, 2025, at 5:00 PM, Willow Liquorice <[email protected]> wrote:
I've been keeping an eye on Zig and noticed this recently-merged branch from
Andrew Kelley, removing support for Plan 9 executables in the linker
(https://github.com/ziglang/zig/pull/24803).
"Not worth the maintenance burden."
I suspect the feeling is mutual right now, given that Zig code rots very
quickly if it uses the stdlib.
I read Ron Minnich was able to get Zig building through vmx acrobatics. That
process is unaffected by the merge as, IIUC, it targets a Linux VM. This is a
blow to self-hosting Zig on Plan 9, though.
- Willow
P.S. "The operating system is not that interesting" my foot!
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