@pauldreik We can make this close to neutral as far as lines of code are concerned. Most of the changes you see have to do with the switch from std::string to const char * in our tools/tests.

The failing tests thus far are unused functions, not real failures.

@pauldreik Most of the changes are now due to the C++11 to C++17 upgrade.

this looks pretty good! looking at it now.

@pauldreik I am now marking this PR as 'ready to review'.

With my latest changes, the 'no C++ lib' part comes really very much for free because we allow anyone to use static initializers.

Note this PR, once merged, would require a MAJOR version as we are bumping up the C++ version to C++17.

Note that this still requires that the C++ stdlib headers are somewhere, whereas my branch did not. My build environment doesn't have access to C++ headers at all so things like <cstring> need to become <string.h>. I can work around this if this ends up being merged as-is, but just noting there is a small semantic difference in that my PR eliminated the need for libc++ at build and runtime, this only eliminates it at runtime.

my local install of spelling does not work properly, but I think this change would fix the spelling ci error:

commit 065bb32c0c2d364adc33ebb2e137069d25badb64 (HEAD -> nostdcxx)
Author: Paul Dreik <[email protected]>
Date:   Tue Apr 21 19:15:19 2026 +0200

    update spell check word list

diff --git a/scripts/check_typos.sh b/scripts/check_typos.sh
index 1befba01..7ac5de65 100755
--- a/scripts/check_typos.sh
+++ b/scripts/check_typos.sh
@@ -8,6 +8,6 @@ set -eu
 # this exits with nonzero status if it finds something, which terminates the script
 codespell \
     --skip="./benchmarks/competition,./build,./fuzz/work"  \
-    -L vie,persan,fo,ans,larg,indx,shft,carryin
+    -L vie,persan,fo,ans,larg,indx,shft,carryin,statics
 
 echo "no typos detected!"

@mitchellh Fair comment. I would submit to you that not requiring the C++ library at runtime ought to be the main point. Do you disagree ?

The C++ headers are tiny by modern standards and you need the C++ compiler anyhow at build time. Users who build their own software, like Gentoo users, will assuredly have the C++ headers. The standard Zig tar ball can compile C++, and it contains the C++ headers.

For us, the downsides of having to code in C++ without even the C++ standard headers is quite significant long term. Reimplementing and maintaining the equivalent of the standard headers is not fun. And risky.

This being said, I bet you can just strap on the minimal set of C++ headers required. My estimation is that it should fit in about 500 kB. It is about the same size as the size of the HTML page (just the HTML) that we are reading now. Or about the same size as the wget command.

Importantly, the standard headers are not needed at runtime (ever). Only at compile time.

@mitchellh I would invite your feedback before I merge this.

@mitchellh

I am going to release.

Feel free to take credit on your blog. Though I did not go with your PR as-is, this current PR would have been impossible without yours... for obvious reasons. I just worked out from the same ideas.