anyzig

A universal zig executable that lets you run any version of zig. Since you can only have one zig executable in your PATH, anyzig removes the limitation that this can only be one version. The version of zig to invoke is pulled from the minimum_zig_version field of build.zig.zon. build.zig.zon is found by searching the current or any parent directory.

Anytime a new zig version is needed, anyzig will invoke the equivalent of zig fetch ZIG_DOWNLOAD_URL to download it into the global cache.

In addition, you can also specify the version of zig to invoke by including it as the first argument, i.e.

$ zig 0.13.0 build-exe myproject.zig
$ zig 0.14.0-dev.3028+cdc9d65b0 build-exe mynewerproject.zig

Anyzig also adds a few of its own commands, which can be queried and invoked with zig any ....

Install

Go to https://marler8997.github.io/anyzig and select your OS/Arch to get a download link and/or instructions to install via the command-line.

Otherwise, you can manually find and download/extract the applicable archive from Releases. It will contain a single static binary named zig, unless you're on Windows in which case it's 2 files, zig.exe and zig.pdb.

Mach Versions and Download Mirror

Mach is a game engine that provides a mirror to download the zig compiler as well as its own "nominated versions" (see https://machengine.org/docs/nominated-zig/). Mach versions use a different format (i.e. 2024.10.0-mach) and always end with -mach, so, if anyzig sees a version that looks like this, it will know it's a mach version and that it needs to resolve it to a URL using mach's download index. In addition, anyzig will also look for a .mach_zig_version = "..." property in your build.zig.zon file and use that instead of .minimum_zig_version.

The reason for using .mach_zig_version instead of .minimum_zig_version is that in the future, zig will likely do some verification of the minimum_zig_version field and using a mach version there is likely to fail.

TODO

• provide a mechanism to list all available zig versions, maybe a way to clean them?
• anyzig should participate in zig build progress reporting especially if it needs to fetch a new compiler version
• make it easy to configure anyzig and share that configuration accross machines
• add a "hook" concept that allows the user to run a command for every new version of zig. anyzig should also track anytime it has run a hook for a new version of zig so that if a hook is added, it will re-run that hook for all existing zig versions. Maybe also just add a "symlinks" directory option that anyzig will create symlinks for each compiler version.
• add a configuration option to configure whether anyzig should try mach's download mirror or the official download links first

Notes

NOTE: is there any reason to support an alternative mechanism to declare which version of zig to use?

NOTE: should we have a command to override the minimum_zig_version in the zon file?

NOTE: If there is no build.zig.zon, anyzig could try to use a set of heuristics to determine which version of zig should be used. Once it's determined, it could create a build.zig.zon file (or alternative) and save the version there.

NOTE: It might be worth trying to detect if anyzig is being run by a user interactively and query the user to enter a version or choose a setting when the version is ambiguous and/or there's some decision to be made. For example, if a user just runs zig init without a version, it could be interesting to query them for the version instead of exiting with an error.