libbuild2-autoconf VS zig

> [...] treated some of the code used for various feature checks invalid and the end result was checks failing even though they should have passed - often with barely any notification to the user (the user would see a "no" instead of a "yes" in some check)

This is a perfect illustration of conceptual bankruptcy of the autoconf approach. Using compile/link tests and basing a decision on whether they succeeded or failed without distinguishing the reasons for failure will inevitably lead to silent false negatives.

If you are wondering what to and what are the alternatives, here is one approach: https://github.com/build2/libbuild2-autoconf

It's "Zig" not "Zag". https://ziglang.org/ Zig is under heavy development, but there's a single page https://ziglang.org/documentation/0.12.0/ that is a reasonably comprehensive source of truth about the current state of the language.

There is an issue proposing this approach: https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/4284

https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/224

e.g.:

> > When debugging/prototyping, it's useful to comment out a line without having to refactor, e.g.

When writing code in a scripting language, sometimes you need that extra bit of performance (or maybe an async feature from Zig).

NodeJS is by no means a slow runtime, it wouldn’t be so popular if it was. But compared to Bun, it’s slow. Bun was built from the ground up with speed in mind, using both JavascriptCore and Zig. The Bun team spent an enormous amount of time and energy trying to make Bun fast, including lots of profiling, benchmarking, and optimizations.

ntdll.dll!RtlUserThreadStart()

There are valid reasons to use APIs from NTDLL. Where I disagree with zig#1840 is the idea that it is always better to use NTDLL versions of API. Every other software ecosystem uses the standard Win32 APIs and diverging from that without a good reason seems like a good way to have unexpected behavior. One concrete example is most users and programmers expect Windows to redirect some file system paths when running on WOW64. But this is implemented in Kernel32, not ntdll.

https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/11894