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.

z-toml reached a stable, tested version with TOML v1.1 support, writer support, and passing validation against the toml-test corpus.

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.

A note on what I am doing with ZagPlot, a small private Zig plotting project. Not a finished tool, just an excuse to learn graphics, API design, and Zig's systems story from the inside.

Why vendor mass spectrometry formats bother me, why a small native bridge might matter, and why Zig feels like the right place to test the idea.

Nextflow and Snakemake both get the big things right and the small things wrong. A bioinformatics-specific engine with no runtime and a single static binary might fix the part that actually costs time.

I already knew Rust. I'm learning Zig anyway. Not because it's better, but because it fits a specific kind of work: small, fast tools that live forever in pipelines. An early take, not a manifesto.