Work with official Zig extension for VS Code

[braheezy]

I wanted to switch from zigup to anyzig but it seems to brick the official Zig extension in VS Code (Cursor specifically). I get an error dialog that says this:

Failed to run '/Users/braheezy/.bin/zig version'!

I suspect the extension is running zig version in a directory that doesn't have my build.zig.zon so anyzig throws an error. This seems to be a specific design choice for anyzig so I'll go back to zigup but wanted to report the issue first.

Thanks for the great tooling! They dramatically improve my dev ex.

[marler8997]

There's a few directions I think we could go here. One of the main ideas behind anyzig is that it stores the various compilers in the global cache. The main reason for this is to provide a standard that other tools can follow so that user's don't have to keep redownloading/storing the same version of the zig toolchain in multiple places. This one feature of being able to fetch the zig toolchain and store it properly in the global cache makes up the majority of the binary code within anyzig. In a sense, anyzig is mostly just a stripped down version of zig that let's you run zig fetch.

With that context, what I'd like to see is the official zig extension support the same pattern of being able to download and store, or just use the various versions of zig in the global cache. One way to do this would be to check the system for anyzig, and use that to download the compilers into the global cache if it's present. Another way is it could try to re-implement the logic to fetch the compilers into the global cache itself. I don't know enough about the extension and the details of how zig fetch works right now to know which direction is best.

Also on this note, anyzig should have a way to discover/list all the zig compilers installed into the global cache. Right now the only way I can think to do that is to go through every folder in the cache and look for the ones that look like they might be zig toolchains based on the contents. In the future though, I think zig might want to add a build.zig.zon file within it's archive with a proper name/fingerprint so we can more easily identify which packages are the zig toolchain.

[RedPhoenixQ]

Just tried this out and also tried modifying anyzig to pass through the --version and version arguments to directly with no luck.

With that context, what I'd like to see is the official zig extension support the same pattern of being able to download and store, or just use the various versions of zig in the global cache.

Since ziglang/vscode-zig#230 the extension does have a version manager that can install zig and zls similarly to anyzig. I'm gonna stick to using that for now.