3169f0529b
Today I found out that posix_spawn is trash. It's actually implemented on top of fork/exec inside of libc (or libSystem in the case of macOS). So, anything posix_spawn can do, we can do better. In particular, what we can do better is handle spawning of child processes that are potentially foreign binaries. If you try to spawn a wasm binary, for example, posix spawn does the following: * Goes ahead and creates a child process. * The child process writes "foo.wasm: foo.wasm: cannot execute binary file" to stderr (yes, it prints the filename twice). * The child process then exits with code 126. This behavior is indistinguishable from the binary being successfully spawned, and then printing to stderr, and exiting with a failure - something that is an extremely common occurrence. Meanwhile, using the lower level fork/exec will simply return ENOEXEC code from the execve syscall (which is mapped to zig error.InvalidExe). The posix_spawn behavior means the zig build runner can't tell the difference between a failure to run a foreign binary, and a binary that did run, but failed in some other fashion. This is unacceptable, because attempting to excecve is the proper way to support things like Rosetta.
A general-purpose programming language and toolchain for maintaining robust, optimal, and reusable software.
Resources
- Introduction
- Download & Documentation
- Chapter 0 - Getting Started | ZigLearn.org
- Community
- Contributing
- Code of Conduct
- Frequently Asked Questions
- Community Projects
Installation
- download a pre-built binary
- install from a package manager
- build from source
- bootstrap zig for any target
License
The ultimate goal of the Zig project is to serve users. As a first-order effect, this means users of the compiler, helping programmers to write better software. Even more important, however, are the end-users.
Zig is intended to be used to help end-users accomplish their goals. Zig should be used to empower end-users, never to exploit them financially, or to limit their freedom to interact with hardware or software in any way.
However, such problems are best solved with social norms, not with software licenses. Any attempt to complicate the software license of Zig would risk compromising the value Zig provides.
Therefore, Zig is available under the MIT (Expat) License, and comes with a humble request: use it to make software better serve the needs of end-users.
This project redistributes code from other projects, some of which have other licenses besides MIT. Such licenses are generally similar to the MIT license for practical purposes. See the subdirectories and files inside lib/ for more details.