What the Duck? It's Zig! ⚡️

The infamous DuckDB quack extension rewritten in C and built with Zig.

Proof that you can develop DuckDB extensions without drowning in boilerplate.

Building the Extension

Install Zig and uv. That's it. No other dependencies are required.

Now experience the power and simplicity of the Zig Build System with these commands:

# Build the extension for all supported DuckDB versions and platforms (Linux, macOS, Windows)
zig build

# Build for a list of DuckDB versions
zig build -Dduckdb-version=1.1.3 -Dduckdb-version=1.2.0

# Build for a list of platforms
zig build -Dplatform=linux_arm64 -Dplatform=osx_arm64 -Dplatform=windows_arm64

# Build for a specific DuckDB version and platform
zig build -Dduckdb-version=1.1.3 -Dplatform=linux_amd64

# Optimize for performance
zig build --release=fast

# Optimize for binary size
zig build --release=small

# Also install DuckDB C headers for development
zig build -Dinstall-headers

The build output in zig-out will look like this:

❯ tree zig-out
zig-out
├── v1.1.0
│   ├── linux_amd64
│   │   └── quack.duckdb_extension
│   ├── linux_amd64_gcc4
│   │   └── quack.duckdb_extension
│   ├── linux_arm64
│   │   └── quack.duckdb_extension
│   ├── linux_arm64_gcc4
│   │   └── quack.duckdb_extension
│   ├── osx_amd64
│   │   └── quack.duckdb_extension
│   ├── osx_arm64
│   │   └── quack.duckdb_extension
│   ├── windows_amd64
│   │   └── quack.duckdb_extension
│   └── windows_arm64
│       └── quack.duckdb_extension
├── v1.1.1
│   ├── linux_amd64
│   │   └── quack.duckdb_extension
│   ├── linux_amd64_gcc4
│   │   └── quack.duckdb_extension
│   ├── linux_arm64
│   │   └── quack.duckdb_extension
│   ├── linux_arm64_gcc4
│   │   └── quack.duckdb_extension
│   ├── osx_amd64
│   │   └── quack.duckdb_extension
│   ├── osx_arm64
│   │   └── quack.duckdb_extension
│   ├── windows_amd64
│   │   └── quack.duckdb_extension
│   └── windows_arm64
│       └── quack.duckdb_extension
├── ...

See zig build --help for more options.

Testing

Run the SQL logic tests with zig build test.

❯ zig build test --summary new
[0/1] test/sql/quack.test
SUCCESS
[0/1] test/sql/quack.test
SUCCESS
[0/1] test/sql/quack.test
SUCCESS
[0/1] test/sql/quack.test
SUCCESS
[0/1] test/sql/quack.test
SUCCESS
Build Summary: 16/16 steps succeeded
test success
├─ sqllogictest v1.1.0 osx_arm64 success 91ms MaxRSS:43M
├─ sqllogictest v1.1.1 osx_arm64 success 92ms MaxRSS:44M
├─ sqllogictest v1.1.2 osx_arm64 success 92ms MaxRSS:43M
├─ sqllogictest v1.1.3 osx_arm64 success 93ms MaxRSS:44M
└─ sqllogictest v1.2.0 osx_arm64 success 103ms MaxRSS:45M

You can also pass -Dduckdb-version to test against a specific DuckDB version, or use -Dplatform to select a different native platform, e.g. linux_amd64_gcc4 instead of linux_amd64.

Using the Extension

❯ duckdb -unsigned
v1.2.0 5f5512b827
Enter ".help" for usage hints.
🟡◗ LOAD 'zig-out/v1.2.0/osx_arm64/quack.duckdb_extension';
🟡◗ SELECT quack('Zig');
┌──────────────┐
│ quack('Zig') │
│   varchar    │
├──────────────┤
│ Quack Zig 🐥 │
└──────────────┘

Creating an Extension Repository

You can easily create your own extension repository. In fact, zig build already does this for you by default! However, you might also want to write files to a different directory and compress them. Here's how:

rm -rf repo

zig build --prefix repo --release=fast

gzip repo/*/*/*.duckdb_extension

This will generate a repository that is ready to be uploaded to S3 with a tool like rclone.

License

Licensed under the MIT License.

Feel free to use this code as a starting point for your own DuckDB extensions. 🐤