Zig was started with that exact use case at the forefront of its design.
- Zig has no hard dependency on libc, it's the user's choice whether he wants to link it or not. It ships musl libc and can build/link it for most (all?) supported targets.
- Most of Zig's standard library works on freestanding targets. No runtime needed. There are no implicit allocators, so the user must use an allocator shipped with the standard library or implement their own.
- Standard library is still in its early days but already provides a lot of functionality out of the box, from containers to io.
- Using the standard library is optional. When it is used, only what is used gets included. The standard library is built from source every time (though there is caching) and its semantic analysis basically does LTO in the codegen stage so you end up with pretty slim binaries.
I don't get the first statement: no hard dependency on libc and ships with musl libc. Does Zig need a libc, so they ship musl libc? Or is it fully self hosting?
The Zig language doesn't need libc, but because it also includes a fully functional C compiler, it ships with musl source and glibc headers for better crossplatform support.
- Zig has no hard dependency on libc, it's the user's choice whether he wants to link it or not. It ships musl libc and can build/link it for most (all?) supported targets.
- Most of Zig's standard library works on freestanding targets. No runtime needed. There are no implicit allocators, so the user must use an allocator shipped with the standard library or implement their own.
- Standard library is still in its early days but already provides a lot of functionality out of the box, from containers to io.
- Using the standard library is optional. When it is used, only what is used gets included. The standard library is built from source every time (though there is caching) and its semantic analysis basically does LTO in the codegen stage so you end up with pretty slim binaries.
Here's a couple of examples:
- https://github.com/andrewrk/clashos
- https://github.com/AndreaOrru/zen