NG plan for Zig / C build / build.zig

[plajjan]

• reduce data sent between actonc and builder
  • this was due to ease of joining paths in Haskell vs Zig
  • but just get on with it, write a function in Zig to join paths and compute more paths in Zig
• add builder flag for only compiling library part (not executable binaries) which is the relevant stuff when used as a dependency
• get rid of prebuilt libActon - always build from source
• use user global zig cache, e.g. ~/.cache/acton/...
• add cache cleaning functionality into acton
  • let cache grow up to X bytes (maybe hard coded for now!?)
  • preferably cleaning only old files periodically, like LRU
  • but if it somehow interferes with zig cache then we'll just have to wipe whole cache when it reaches the maximum allowable size
• have separate caches for Acton base and Acton projects
  • not sure this is possible with Zig today? there is some support for overriding stuff, but still, can we achieve this?
• get rid of out/ rel / dev, if we always build from sources we won't have prebuilt libraries so it is not necessary to have rel or dev. Output just goes in out/. So it'll be like out/lib/libActonProject.a and out/bin/foo
• add acton(c) option to skip C compilation
• skip C compilation when building base for Acton distribution
• stop include of library archives of external library dependencies, like libuv, as part of distribution, Only include deps as sources, do not bundle built libs in distribution #1871
• avoid building external library dependencies at distribution build time since we don't need them, only build what is necessary for actondb and preferably out-of-tree (hard with includes!?) Only include deps as sources, do not bundle built libs in distribution #1871
• can we clear out the oldest stuff from the cache rather than everything? LRU style? Zig issues / feature improvements affecting Acton (tracking issue) #1603 Automatically evict zig-cache to stop it growing too large ziglang/zig#15358
• support inclusion of external libraries

[plajjan]

All done here, closing.