Upgrading My Git Embedding Program for Zig 0.16

Dusting Off ishi for Zig 0.16.0 | Louis LeFebvre (✿◠‿◠)Dusting Off ishi for Zig 0.16.0 2026-05-15 The Wolves are getting hammered. Game 6 Western Semis against the Spurs, who lead the series 3-2. I decided it wouldn’t hurt to do a little multi-tasking — half-watching the game, half-staring at a GitHub Actions tab — and figured if my evening plans were a little bitter, I might as well make it a bitter-sweet and dust off a side project that needed some love, ishi. A quick background on ishi, it’s essentially “pgvector storage for git intelligence”. You point it at a repo, it embeds your commit history into a pgvector database, and then you can ask it semantic questions like “what changed about the build system?” and it’ll pull the most relevant commits back. I hadn’t touched it in a few weeks. So I opened the repo and noticed the CI was red, and I’d been poking at Zig 0.16.0 in a tiny toy repo called hash to learn swiss tables, so I figured it was a good time to upgrade.

A new fingerprint, fetch some resources The CI log was unambiguous: /home/runner/work/ishi/ishi/build.zig.zon:41:21: error: hash mismatch: manifest declares 'zul-0.0.0-1oDot9yRBwDA_ovd6GC1M_ViW3LarywMaGrH6vcuEjqv' but the fetched package has 'zul-0.0.0-1oDot4qXBwCHBYRdqx2aqkVPgcXiIOm9GXT5zLOCf_H3' A quick peek at build.zig.zon revealed why — I’d lazily pinned the zul dep to …/zul/archive/master.tar.gz, which is the exact opposite of a pin: .{ .name = .ishi, .version = "0.0.0", .fingerprint = 0xa89789cfdd52da45, // never changes .minimum_zig_version = "0.15.2", .dependencies = .{ .zul = .{ .url = "https://github.com/karlseguin/zul/archive/master.tar.gz", .hash = "zul-0.0.0-1oDot9yRBwDA_ovd6GC1M_ViW3LarywMaGrH6vcuEjqv", }, }, Karl Seguin had merged “Writergate part 2” into zul/master since my last commit, so the tarball moved, the hash changed, CI cried. The two-second fix would have been zig fetch --save=zul against an immutable commit URL: $ zig fetch --save=zul https://github.com/karlseguin/zul/archive/776ba3b7db3bb03784a768d90c23dee26dee3268.tar.gz warning: overwriting existing dependency named 'zul' That regenerates the .hash entry in build.zig.zon for you — no hand-editing required. But before I knew it, I was rolling my sleeves up: if I was already in this file, I might as well bump .minimum_zig_version = "0.16.0" and do the whole upgrade properly. Zig 0.16.0 had landed in January1 and I’d been wanting an excuse to play with it. Goodbye, zul The first surprise: with .minimum_zig_version = "0.16.0" set, zig build died inside zul/src/arc.zig: zul/src/arc.zig:34:18: error: invalid builtin function: '@Type' const Args = @Type(.{ ^~~~~ The Zig 0.16.0 release notes confirm: @Type was removed and replaced by individual builtins (@Int, @Struct, @Tuple, …). Karl hasn’t patched arc.zig yet, and there’s a closed PR that didn’t land. So zul on 0.16.0 is a no-go until upstream catches up. I almost forked it. Then I looked at how much of zul I was actually using: $ grep -rn 'zul' src/ src/lib/runner.zig:2:const zul = @import("zul"); src/lib/runner.zig:67: var client = zul.http.Client.init(allocator); src/lib/runner.zig:114: var client = zul.http.Client.init(allocator); Two call sites of zul.http.Client. That’s it. And meanwhile the 0.16.0 release notes were bragging about the new std.http.Client — first-class, async DNS, happy-eyeballs, the works. Why was I hauling around a dep? So out it went. The replacement uses the high-level client.fetch helper plus an std.Io.Writer.Allocating to capture the response body: fn postJson( allocator: std.mem.Allocator, io: std.Io, endpoint: []const u8, body: []const u8, ) ![]u8 { var client: std.http.Client = .{ .allocator = allocator, .io = io }; defer client.deinit();

var response_buf: std.Io.Writer.Allocating = .init(allocator); defer response_buf.deinit();

const result = try client.fetch(.{ .location = .{ .url = endpoint }, .method = .POST, .payload = body, .headers = .{ .content_type = .{ .override = "application/json" } }, .response_writer = &response_buf.writer, });

const status_int = @intFromEnum(result.status); if (status_int 200 or status_int >= 300) { return error.RunnerRequestFailed; return response_buf.toOwnedSlice(); Karl, if you’re reading this — your libraries got me a long way. Just got lapped by the standard library this time around. Juicy main This is the part of the upgrade that makes me so happy I decided to learn Zig. Zig 0.16.0 introduced “Juicy Main”: pub fn main now takes a std.process.Init parameter that hands you a bunch of “pre-initialized goodies”. pub fn main(init: std.process.Init) !void { const allocator = init.gpa; // const io = init.io; // const args = try init.minimal.args.toSlice(init.arena.allocator());

const f = try Flags.init(allocator, init); defer f.deinit(); // ... init.gpa is a debug-mode-leak-checked general-purpose allocator. init.arena...

Upgrading My Git Embedding Program for Zig 0.16

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