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A comment on Zig cc: A drop-in replacement for GCC/Clang (2020). Parent comment

Re:Zig cc: A drop-in replacement for GCC/Clang (2020) by flohofwoe on Sunday July 18, 2021 @01:54PM (#27874909)
The Metal shader compiler is an unfortunate special case, because the bytecode and the Metal compiler tools are proprietary and locked up by Apple (there are precompiled binaries of the Metal compiler for Windows, but not Linux). The ball is definitely in Apple's court here, there's nothing any language project can do, except illegally reverse engineering Metal bytecode, which obviously isn't a good idea.

The system API problem can be solved by shipping automatically generated API bindings (similar to what Microsoft does with the Rust bindings to the Windows APIs, a similar project for Zig is underway). Once those bindings exist, no Windows SDK is needed anymore and cross-compiling should "just work".

PS: Zig actually ships with the mingw headers in the default installation (e.g. windows.h, d3d11.h, dxgi.h etc are all there), I haven't actually tried to cross-compile a Windows executable using the Win32 APIs though, but it looks like it should work already.

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Re:Zig cc: A drop-in replacement for GCC/Clang (2020) by kevin_thibedeau on Sunday July 18, 2021 @02:31PM (#27875238)
> illegally reverse engineering Metal bytecode

Reverse engineering is legal in the US (unless bound by contract).

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Re:Zig cc: A drop-in replacement for GCC/Clang (2020) by Cloudef on Sunday July 18, 2021 @10:46PM (#27878756)
The metal compiler probably could run with darling
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Re:Zig cc: A drop-in replacement for GCC/Clang (2020) by pcwalton on Sunday July 18, 2021 @03:11PM (#27875625)
So does every new release of any Windows component require a new version of Zig? That doesn't seem sustainable.
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Re:Zig cc: A drop-in replacement for GCC/Clang (2020) by flohofwoe on Sunday July 18, 2021 @03:42PM (#27875963)
I don't actually know what Windows components mingw supports in detail and how often mingw is updated because of that, but I guess that the important Win32 APIs are stable. I suppose that the new APIs which are highly in flux could be supported by separate packages, like this: https://github.com/marlersoft/zigwin32)
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