I'm not in the community but aren't they considering removing the dependency on LLVM, and not being a C compiler anymore? Am I misunderstanding that?
As I understand it, C/C++ interop and support in the build system is not going away; instead it might be accomplished via a separately maintained clang package. (Aside: for an example of this kind of thing can work, see ffmpeg[2] converted to use the Zig build system which pulls in nasm[3] as a Zig package; presumably the clang solution would be a bit more integrated than that, but it serves to show that it can be done).
Zig will still support compilation using LLVM, but instead of directly linking to LLVM and using LLVM's IRBuilder API, it will directly output LLVM bitcode instead[4]. The build system will then handle linking this into an executable, possibly by calling out to the LLVM linker.
The idea seems to be to reduce dependencies of the main executable, while keeping the build system flexible enough that it does not impact existing use cases.
I'm not affiliated with the Zig project in any way, so my understanding of this may be off. I'd recommend reading the GH issues and comments I've linked below to get a better idea of it.
[1]: https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/16270#issuecomment-161...
[2]: https://github.com/andrewrk/ffmpeg