How to use libxev with Zig 0.14 based project

The libxev is a library that is somewhat similar to libuv for NodeJS - async I/O event loop for C and Zig.

With the recent stable release of Zig 0.14, there was a small breaking change in the build.zig, so the previously introduced way doesn't work.

To make it clear here is a step by step note.

Steps

First of all, create a new Zig project:

$ mkdir blink && cd blink
$ zig init

Open the build.zig.zon file, and add the libxev lines in the dependencies block:

The URL can be found from the https://github.com/mitchellh/libxev/commits/main/
The hash can be empty, but running zig build tells us

.dependencies = .{
    .libxev = .{
        .url = "https://github.com/mitchellh/libxev/archive/3df9337a9e84450a58a2c4af434ec1a036f7b494.tar.gz",
        .hash = "libxev-0.0.0-86vtc-ziEgDbLP0vihUn1MhsxNKY4GJEga6BEr7oyHpz",
    },
},

Then open the build.zig file, and add these lines:

The addExecutable line should exist, so the 2 lines below are the new ones to add.

const exe = b.addExecutable(.{
     .name = "blink",
     .root_module = exe_mod,
});

const xev = b.dependency("libxev", .{ .target = target, .optimize = optimize });
exe.root_module.addImport("xev", xev.module("xev"));

Lastly open the src/main.zig file, and replace the contents with the basic timer example from the libxev repo.

https://github.com/mitchellh/libxev/blob/main/examples/_basic.zig

bus710/README.md

How to use libxev with Zig 0.14 based project

Steps