Build all dependencies with zig so we don't have to depend on vcpkg

[shreyassanthu77]

As the title says, this is an attempt to make the build process self sufficient and make it not depend on vcpkg or any other external tools

build.zig is currently a mess but will fix it up once i get it working.
currently only tested on x86_64 linux, windows and aarch64 linux. Cross compilation tested to x86_64-macos, aarch64-macos and aarch64-windows but not sure if the binary actually works (it should tho).

for x86 systems we currently need nasm to be available but i am planning to build it from source on the fly when not available

I don't have tiff building from source yet so cross compilation does't work with it but if we disable tiff support "it just works"

Todos

• spng
• jpeg
• tiff
• Make static linking optional and allow dynamic linking at build time
• move over the io code entirely to zig and expose a public c API from zig
• Build nasm? (probably too far but idk lol)
• make sure powerpc and mips builds don't fail

[shreyassanthu77]

works pretty well on my machine (arch btw)

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but for whatever reason png fails on wine when i do a release build. Not sure if this is a wine thing or a windows thing (jpeg works tho which is strange)

[dmtrKovalenko]

this is huge thank you Shreyas!

[shreyassanthu77]

btw the builds will fail for a bit cuz the pr is incomplete

don't merge it yet

[shreyassanthu77]

heyy @dmtrKovalenko do you want tiff to support WEBP, LZMA, ZSTD, JBIG, LERC, etc too? i don't think they are very common and will bloat the binary. we already pull in zlib for spng and libjeg for jpeg so we get those basically for free

what you think?

[dmtrKovalenko]

there is an issue for webp support so I think it would be cool #124

Maybe avif as well becuase I know one image lossless optimizer uses odiff as a testing tooling so it might be useful.

[shreyassanthu77]

okay we can do that but I mean for the tiff itself (it's a container format that can store jpeg, lossless zlib compressed or webp etc pixel data)

Also did you look at https://github.com/zigimg/zigimg ?

[shreyassanthu77]

@dmtrKovalenko
update: all deps linked statically from source and looks like all tests are passing too

but our tiff buld has

• No support for jbig (i doubt anyone in 2025 actually use that lol)
• no support for webp (tho if we add it to tiff we should just add support for webps in general and enable it for libtiff)
• i haven't enabled support for some compression formats (lzma and zstd)

[dmtrKovalenko]

suspicious that only x86 builds are failling

[shreyassanthu77]

oh probably because of nasm not being in path i think

[shreyassanthu77]

okay i went through open issues and this pr could close these

• diff PNG is missing IEND chunk/invalid CRC checksum #109 (they already had a pr but I fixed it while moving the png code to zig :) )

• Linux alpine. Can't compare images - empty error  #55 and Fix alpine package  #5 this now produces a completely static executable so should work even on scratch containers (not tested but i don't see why it wouldn't)

• FreeBSD Support Maybe? :) #26 i think move to zig actually fixed it already so maybe good ot close it but this pr makes it so you don't even need the user to have anything installed

• accept buffers as input #53 can also be implemented pretty easily now i think idk tho

• [Question/Feature Request] WEBP Support? #124 i could potentially spend another 10 hours converting libwebp to use zig build and this would be done too lol

we could potentially even have a wasm build so people can use it in webcontainers or even browsers now that the file system api is actually pretty usable