Zig's incremental compilation is a serious engineering bet

A deep-dive into Zig's incremental compilation internals generated genuine enthusiasm and a pointed comment: 'It disappoints me how unseriously the industry has taken compilation speed for so long.' The thread discusses whether incremental compilation works for release builds yet and whether it extends to C code, since Zig can compile C.

The pattern here is that Zig is steadily building a case as a systems language for people who are frustrated with the compile-time experience of C++ and the complexity overhead of Rust. Incremental compilation is one of the practical, day-to-day advantages that compounds over a development cycle.

The C compilation question is practically important. A lot of real-world codebases are mixed C and something else, and if Zig's incremental compiler works on C, it becomes useful for a much larger existing codebase surface area, not just greenfield Zig projects.