Installation

Build and install Zinc for your platform and language

Zinc ships as a shared library (libzinc_core) with per-language adapter packages. Build the core, then install the adapter for your language.

Windows is not supported. Zinc uses POSIX shared memory (shm_open + mmap). There are no plans to add Windows support.

Prerequisites

• Rust 1.82 or later
• A C compiler toolchain (Xcode on macOS, build-essential on Linux)
• For adapter packages: the corresponding language runtime

Build the core

The core library is a Rust crate at the core/ directory. It compiles to a cdylib that every language adapter loads at runtime.

git clone https://github.com/aspect-build/zinc
cd zinc
cargo build --release --manifest-path core/Cargo.toml

The output appears at:

• Linux: core/target/release/libzinc_core.so
• macOS: core/target/release/libzinc_core.dylib

The build also generates include/zinc.h via cbindgen. This header is the C ABI contract. All adapters derive their FFI bindings from it.

By language

Rust

# Add zinc-core as a dependency
cargo add zinc-core --path /path/to/zinc/core

# Or from crates.io (once published)
cargo add zinc-core

Library path

All adapters expect libzinc_core.{so,dylib} on the library search path. The easiest approach is to place the compiled library in a standard location:

Linux

sudo cp core/target/release/libzinc_core.so /usr/local/lib/
sudo ldconfig

Alternatively, set the library path via LD_LIBRARY_PATH (Linux) or DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH (macOS).

Platform notes

• Linux requires glibc 2.17 or later. The notify/wait backend uses the futex syscall.
• macOS uses an adaptive spin-loop for wait (the ulock API is private on Darwin).

Windows is not supported. Zinc uses shm_open and mmap, which are POSIX APIs not available on Windows.

Verify the installation

Build the core, then run the C ABI test:

cargo test --manifest-path core/Cargo.toml

All tests should pass on Linux and macOS.