Zig 0.16.0 'Juicy Main' Released — New Async I/O Interface, Dependency Injection for main(), 244 Contributors

Zig Project / Simon Willison·medium signal

Zig 0.16.0 shipped with 8 months of work from 244 contributors across 1,183 commits. The headline feature 'Juicy Main' introduces dependency injection for your program's main() function, providing appropriate defaults for allocators and the new I/O interface. The async I/O overhaul introduces a new std.Io interface supporting both threaded and event-driven backends (io_uring for Linux, GCD for macOS), alongside simplified package management moving dependencies to a local zig-pkg directory with compressed cache.