The ci job fails with

error: while querying the derivation named ‘zig-0.1.1’:
while evaluating the attribute ‘cmakeFlags’ of the derivation ‘zig-0.1.1’ at /tmp/nix-build-nixpkgs-tarball-18.03pre1234.abcdef.drv-0/nixpkgs/pkgs/stdenv/generic/make-derivation.nix:98:11:
while evaluating the attribute ‘cc.libc.dev’ at /tmp/nix-build-nixpkgs-tarball-18.03pre1234.abcdef.drv-0/nixpkgs/pkgs/build-support/cc-wrapper/default.nix:100:12:
attribute ‘dev’ missing, at /tmp/nix-build-nixpkgs-tarball-18.03pre1234.abcdef.drv-0/nixpkgs/pkgs/development/compilers/zig/default.nix:17:31

do you know why that error happened? it worked for me when I tested it. do you have a suggestion for how to fix? I just need the path to libc include directory.

It only happens when evaling the tarball for darwin, so I guess cc.libc is not uniform across all the archs. You can try using getDev stdenv.cc.libc or stdenv.cc.libc_dev (the same thing), they should be more robust than accessing .dev directly.

LGTM!

When trying to build Tetris it's not obvious how to tell zig where to find libraries and such.

Would it make sense / be reasonable to (only in Nix-built zig, perhaps) patch Zig to understand NIX_CFLAGS_COMPILE and similar?

(I see it takes clang-like arguments such as -isystem and -dirafter, maybe a wrapper like cc-wrapper would be better?)

Just a thought and is less about packaging Zig (this PR) and more about packaging things written in Zig :).

EDIT:
After poking at this some more

a) Wrapper might be difficult for projects with build.zig; we could 'wrap' zig build-exe but I'm not sure to what end

b) Adding appropriate -isystem, -L, and --library for tetris dependencies.... I'm able to build and run it?! 😁

EDIT2:
@andrewrk helped me on IRC and turns out things already magically work with zig build!!
For example, this dummy Nix expression (save as shell.nix) makes tetris work out-of-the-box after nix-shell'ing. Glorious!

@joachifm I changed it to stdenv.cc.libc_dev. It evaluates to the same expression on NixOS.

From the macos build log:

In file included from /tmp/nix-build-zig-0.1.1.drv-0/zig-0.1.1-src/deps/lld/COFF/Config.h:13:
In file included from /nix/store/pqwvpnqhskx1h1mkwcbf3713rdnzgg7f-llvm-5.0.0/include/llvm/ADT/StringRef.h:13:
/nix/store/pqwvpnqhskx1h1mkwcbf3713rdnzgg7f-llvm-5.0.0/include/llvm/ADT/STLExtras.h:20:10: fatal error: 'algorithm' file not found
#include <algorithm> // for std::all_of
 ^~~~~~~~~~~

Do we need to manually pass in libstdc++ or something? (the other platforms built successfully)