Zig 0.11.0 Debuts Package Management

Zig 0.11.0 arrives

Zig 0.11.0 was released on August 4, 2023. According to the official release notes, it featured 8 months of work with changes from 269 different contributors spread among 4,457 commits, and the team described it as the debut of package management, a long-awaited capability for the systems language.

Multi-object for loops

The release introduced multi-object for loops, a new construct for cleanly iterating over multiple sequences of the same length. Instead of iterating one slice and using a captured index to reach into another, you can now write for (input, output) |x, *out| and capture output by reference. Ranges like 0.. can also be passed as operands, and the language safety-checks that all iterated slices share the same length.

A WebAssembly allocator

The standard library gained std.heap.wasm_allocator, a WebAssembly-only allocator the team described as simultaneously simple, fast and small, made possible by the new memory-allocation API that allows shrink to fail. Compiled with -OReleaseSmall for wasm32-freestanding, the example allocator produces roughly a 1 KB wasm object file, and it is used when bootstrapping Zig itself.

Platform and toolchain updates

Zig 0.11.0 raised the minimum supported Windows version to 10 after Microsoft dropped LTS support for 8.1, made 64-bit ARM (aarch64) Windows a Tier 2 target tested on every commit, and began recognizing compiled .res Windows resource files as linkable inputs. The toolchain moved to LLVM 16, musl 1.2.4 and glibc 2.34.

Related on Skillo

See also: Zig 0.12.0 and the new autodoc.

Sources

• Zig 0.11.0 Release Notes (ziglang.org)
• Zig download page (release dates)

Published date reflects the original event date (2023-08-04). This article is original Skillo editorial written from the sources above; facts were verified in September 2026.