Some new vcflib functionality is written in the Zig programming language.
The first tool to use Zig code is vcfcreatemulti.
Zig is very fast and performance often beats C and C++ code.
So far, this code uses the test allocator only. I think it won't have much impact replacing it with another allocator because vcflib is IO bound. If anyone wants to try we could replace it. The good thing about the test allocator is that it complains if things do not get cleaned up.
To add zig to your build environment simply download the binary and add it to the path. Next setup the Cmake build environment in the usual way:
cd build
cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug ..
cmake --build .
ctest .
The current build workflow on github CI builds with zig. So you can check how it is done on Debian/Ubuntu.
In src/zig you can run
zig build
zig build test
To run the unit tests locally. Note that this is also part of vcflib's ctest.
Zig uses a C-ABI. To exchange data with C++ requires some data wrangling as is shown in vcf-c-api and vcf.zig. Nothing too serious, just remember to use the 0 sentinel when passing C strings.
Zig has a tight system for handling errors. For within zig errors are handled with catch unreachable so the system will simply croak.
For warnings we build up a list of them. Before exiting the code (from C++) be sure to call zig_display_warnings().