Bundling binary tools in Python wheels

zig cc could be a smaller, easy-installed and full featured frontend of Clang. What you only need to do is just pip install ziglang when you're not convenient to use gcc or clang. Cross platform build will benefit from this a lot.

zig cc is not the main purpose of the Zig project. It merely exposes the already-existing capabilities of the Zig compiler via a small frontend layer that parses C compiler options.

Another two cents:

• Other tools could be also installed from pip, such as nodejs.
• Zig's Linux tarballs are fully statically linked. And it's also easy to build target with different glibc (eg: -target x86_64-linux-gnu.2.28, -target x86_64-linux-musl). Pretty good that host and target are decoupled.

Ref:

• Bundling binary tools in Python wheels

Further readings:

• How Uber Uses Zig