Compile Redis With Zig

There is a HN thread about C development setup that I tried to follow for my electronics project. At the end, I am not sure if I like the Docker+DevContainer+CMake setup. I used CMake ~10 years ago during my graduate program but wasn’t a big fan, and seems like I am still not today. Not to mention the mental overhead of learning Docker and DevContainer.

But in the HN thread, it mentions Zig as the build system for C/C++ projects. I have toyed with Zig late last year around Christmas time, which is more about getting a taste of the syntax. So I thought, why not give it a try.

As suggested in the thread, I tried Loris Cro’s C/C++/Zig Series. The first step is to compile Redis with Zig. The command we need is make CC="zig cc" CXX="zig c++", which is telling make to use Zig as the compiler. In the article, it suggests “you will need to use Zig 0.8.1 and commit be6ce8a of Redis”. But I decided to try with Redis 7.2 and the latest Zig 0.11 instead.

The error I ran into is:

MAKE fpconv
cd fpconv && /Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/usr/bin/make
zig cc  -Wall -Os -g  -c  fpconv_dtoa.c
ar rcs libfpconv.a fpconv_dtoa.o
    CC adlist.o
error: LTO is not yet supported with the Mach-O object format. More details: https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/8680

Looks like Zig 0.11 doesn’t support LTO yet, but with a minor change to comment out -flto in Makefile, I was able to compile successfully!