Until version 0.12.0 (April 2024), you could make arbitrary syscalls, allowing you to generate code at comptime, and promote vars between comptime and runtime. [0] Before then, you could do some rather funky things with pointers and memory, and was very much not hygienic.

[0] https://ziglang.org/download/0.12.0/release-notes.html#Compt...