Installation

Installation

Each release has a ready-made static binary for Linux on x86-64 and on aarch64; anything else is built from source with Zig.

Download a release

curl -fLO https://github.com/eneskemalergin/z-fastq/releases/download/v0.2.1/z-fastq-0.2.1-linux-x86_64.tar.gz
curl -fLO https://github.com/eneskemalergin/z-fastq/releases/download/v0.2.1/SHA256SUMS
sha256sum --check --ignore-missing SHA256SUMS
tar -xzf z-fastq-0.2.1-linux-x86_64.tar.gz
./z-fastq-0.2.1-linux-x86_64/z-fastq --version

On an ARM machine, use linux-aarch64 in place of linux-x86_64. The archive holds the binary and its license. It needs no libraries, so copy it into a directory on your PATH. With the GitHub CLI, gh attestation verify z-fastq-0.2.1-linux-x86_64.tar.gz --repo eneskemalergin/z-fastq also confirms the archive was built by this repository's release workflow.

Build from source

The build needs nothing beyond Zig itself: no C compiler, no NASM, and no system zlib, and the release build below is fully static.

You need

• Linux on x86-64 or aarch64.
• Zig 0.16.0.
• Network access for the first build, which downloads z-fastq's one package dependency, zipir 0.3.0. Later builds reuse it.

From the repository root:

zig build -Dstatic=true -Doptimize=ReleaseFast
./zig-out/bin/z-fastq --version

The second line prints z-fastq 0.2.1.

• -Doptimize=ReleaseSafe keeps Zig's safety checks in the release build.
• A plain zig build gives a debug build, for working on the code.

The binary stays in zig-out/bin/; there is no package-manager install yet. Copy or link it into a directory on your PATH to call it as z-fastq.

Faster code on newer CPUs

The x86-64 release binary runs on any x86-64 CPU and switches to faster code where the CPU allows: PCLMUL and SSE4.1 for the gzip checksum, and AVX2 for line search, validation, and base and quality counting on records of 1 KiB or more. The output is identical either way. The aarch64 release binary runs on any ARMv8-A CPU and selects nothing at run time.

Build without run-time selection

zig build -Dstatic=true -Doptimize=ReleaseFast -Dkernel-backend=portable

This build uses only the instructions of its target CPU. The default is -Dkernel-backend=dispatch, and the tests pass with both.

Check the build

zig build test --summary all

Related pages

• Getting started: a first run, command by command.
• Troubleshooting: when the build or the binary does not behave.
• For contributors: the full set of test runs.