Build System Reworked
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Article about reworking a build system, relevant to developer experience and infrastructure.
Summary
Zig's build system splits into a configurer process (debug mode) that serializes build.zig's graph to a binary config file, and a maker process (release mode, cached per Zig version) that executes it. The parent `zig build` caches the config and asynchronously compiles the maker, avoiding rerunning build.zig if nothing changed and only recompiling user logic on changes. Benchmarks show a 90.4% wall time reduction for `zig build --help` (150ms to 14.3ms) with dramatic drops in CPU cycles and instructions.