C and C++ cover the classic extension story. Rust through extendr and Savvy brings memory safety to the table. Both are modern, both are performant. Neither fits the R C API boundary as naturally as a language designed to treat C interop as a first-class feature. Early observations from zigr: six backends, 23 tasks, and a case for Zig as the missing option.

A note on why I forked Andrew Kelley's poop into zebrac, what I have added so far, and the direction I want to take it next.

Early prototype of a domain-specific compression codec for mass spectrometry data. Lossless path beats gzip and comes close to mzMLb. Lossy at q=4096 hits 13.17 MiB from 75.55 MiB mzML. Single DDA dataset. Decode is 27x faster than mzMLb. Early days.

Zero-dependency FASTA indexing that matches samtools byte-for-byte while running up to 17x faster. Built in Zig with SIMD and mmap. Also: a proof of concept that needs Zig 0.14, has no gzip support, and cannot extract sequences yet.