Zig breaking change – Initial Writergate

As a hobby Zig developer, it's a bummer to see a breaking change in something so fundamental, but I get that's what I accept when building on a pre-1.0 language.

I hope that the Zig team invests more into helping with migration than they have in the past. My experience for past breaking changes is that downstream developers got left in the cold without clear guidance about how to fix breaking changes.

In Zig 0.12.0 (released just a year ago), there were a lot of breaking changes to the build system that the release notes didn't explain at all. To see what I mean, look at the changes I had to make[0] in a Zig 0.11.0 project and then search the release notes[1] for guidance on those changes. Most of the breaking changes aren't even mentioned, much less explained how to migrate from 0.11.0 to 0.12.0.

>Some of you may die, but that is a sacrifice I am willing to make.

>-Lord Farquaad

[0] https://github.com/mtlynch/zenith/pull/90/files#diff-f87bb35...

[1] https://ziglang.org/download/0.12.0/release-notes.html

It might be nice if language and library authors at least included a really good prompt detailing all the required changes so an LLM can take a first pass at fixing everything.

Even better if it can be done with a deterministic codemod, but a prompt is easier to write.