Zig's Incremental Compilation Internals
As a member of the Zig core team, one of the most impactful projects I’ve been involved with is the implementation of incremental compilation into the Zig compiler. Here’s a simple video (no audio) demonstrating me using Zig to quickly make and test some changes to Fizzy, a pixel editor application. The initial build takes around 5 seconds, and then every time I make a change, a rebuild completes in 50–70ms.For this demo, I had to upgrade Fizzy to Zig’s master branch.
- ▪As a member of the Zig core team, one of the most impactful projects I’ve been involved with is the implementation of incremental compilation into the Zig compiler.
- ▪Here’s a simple video (no audio) demonstrating me using Zig to quickly make and test some changes to Fizzy, a pixel editor application.
- ▪The initial build takes around 5 seconds, and then every time I make a change, a rebuild completes in 50–70ms.For this demo, I had to upgrade Fizzy to Zig’s master branch.
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| Original publisher | Co |
| Canonical URL | https://mlugg.co.uk/posts/incremental-compilation-internals/ |
| Publication time | Tue, 28 Jul 2026 15:46:45 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-07-28T16:15:32.640Z |
| Last seen | 2026-07-28T16:15:34.339Z |
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| Cluster | _WFcQmBxfHB5 · 1 stories |
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As a member of the Zig core team, one of the most impactful projects I’ve been involved with is the implementation of incremental compilation into the Zig compiler. This feature allows the compiler to detect which individual functions and declarations have changed since a project was last built, recompile only that code, and directly patch the resulting bytes into the output binary, making the rebuild extremely fast.The Zig project has been working towards this feature for a long time, and over the last few release cycles, it has finally gone from a proof-of-concept quality feature to one which is viable for real-world projects and which most of the Zig core team makes daily use of.Today, using Zig’s incremental compilation, you can make changes to real, complex applications in a matter…
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