Thank you.

I also started reading through the Zig overview [1] and near the end of that document it says this: "Not only can Zig compile C code, but there is a very good reason to use Zig as a C compiler: Zig ships with libc."

From the doc, IIUC, compilation of header files and other C code allows Zig to do direct interop with no intermediaries. Seems useful.

[1] https://ziglang.org/learn/overview/

That's just wrapping clang. They're working on replacing it

translate-c is not required for compiling pure Zig code. However, the plan is to remove the "@cImport" built in. So if your project is importing a c header, in the future you'll add build step translating it from c to Zig, and then you import it into your Zig code as a module.

How does this work with things which are expressible only in C? For example, Pascal strings with flexible array members?

I guess since you said header, you keep everything opaque and create a header for that which gets translated to Zig.

It's super exciting. c2nim is one of the things that makes using Nim in _super_ odd places (like professional embedded firmware development) feasible, and translate-c brings Zig that much closer to what I'd love from it! Embedded Zig is going to be rad, once we get there.

what is the reason for this change? zig less than newbie here. I've only just recently started reading the zig overview, although I have been reading hn posts about zig with interest for some time.

Primary reason is that it removes a dependency on libclang, and as such is required to remove the LLVM dependency.