Comment by LexiMax
18 hours ago
To wit: https://ziglang.org/documentation/master/#extern-struct
> An extern struct has in-memory layout matching the C ABI for the target.
Zig is really good at speaking the C ABI of the target, but the upshot seems to be that it appears there is no stable Zig-native ABI.
If I'm correct, I wonder if there are plans to settle on a stable ABI at some point in the future. I do know that in other languages the lack of a stable ABI is brought up as a downside, and although I've been burned by C++ ABI stability too many times to agree, I can understand why people would want one.
I doubt zig will have stable abi any time soon. It may have some sort of "zig extern" when it gets mature. But stable abi isnt very usful if no-one else can talk it. I have project that uses codegen to effectively implement zig like ABI on top of the C abi.
Heres the kind of code it generates https://zigbin.io/6dba68
It can also generate javascript, heres doom running on browser: https://cloudef.pw/sorvi/#doom.wasm
Andrew Kelley has said relatively recently that there are no plans to introduce a Zig ABI: https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/3786#issuecomment-2646...
What's interesting is that the scope of the proposal isn't a Zig-specific ABI, but a codified way of expressing certain Zig concepts using the existing C ABI.
That could be an interesting middle ground.
Yeah the new translate-c package already kind of does that.