Zig replaces third-party C code with Zig’s own code

Over the past month or so, several enterprising contributors have taken an interest in the zig libc subproject. The idea here is to incrementally delete redundant code, by providing libc functions as Zig standard library wrappers rather than as vendored C source files. In many cases, these functions are one-to-one mappings, such as memcpy or atan2, or trivially wrap a generic function, like strnlen.

So far, roughly 250 C source files have been deleted from the Zig repository, with 2032 remaining.

With each function that makes the transition, Zig gains independence from third party projects and from the C programming language, compilation speed improves, Zig’s installation size is simplified and reduced, and user applications which statically link libc enjoy reduced binary size.

↫ Andrew Kelley on the Zig Devlog

The goal is to replace all of the musl, wasi-libc, and MinGW-w64 C code bundled in Zig with new Zig code.