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 extension for all platforms (Linux, macOS, Windows)
zig build

# Only build for a specific platform
zig build -Dplatform=linux_amd64

# Build for multiple platforms
zig build -Dplatform=linux_arm64 -Dplatform=osx_arm64 -Dplatform=windows_arm64

# Build for a specific DuckDB version
zig build -Dduckdb-version=1.1.2

# Optimize for performance
zig build --release=fast

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

# Also install DuckDB C headers for development (to zig-out/include by default)
zig build -Dinstall-headers

The build output will look like this:

❯ tree zig-out
zig-out
├── 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
[0/1] test/sql/quack.test
SUCCESS

Note: Testing is currently broken for DuckDB 1.2.0 as the duckdb Python package is not yet available.

Using the Extension

❯ duckdb -unsigned
v1.1.3 19864453f7
Enter ".help" for usage hints.
🟡◗ LOAD 'zig-out/osx_arm64/quack.duckdb_extension';
🟡◗ SELECT quack('Zig');
┌──────────────┐
│ quack('Zig') │
│   varchar    │
├──────────────┤
│ Quack Zig 🐥 │
└──────────────┘

Advanced: Creating an Extension Repository

You can easily create your own extension repository by providing a custom installation prefix.

Here's an example:

rm -rf repo

# Add more versions as needed
for version in 1.1.3 1.2.0; do
    zig build -Dduckdb-version=${version} --prefix repo/v${version} --release=fast
done

gzip repo/*/*/*.duckdb_extension

This will generate a repository with the following structure, ready to be uploaded to S3:

❯ tree repo
repo
├── v1.1.3
│   ├── linux_amd64
│   │   └── quack.duckdb_extension.gz
│   ├── linux_amd64_gcc4
│   │   └── quack.duckdb_extension.gz
│   ├── linux_arm64
│   │   └── quack.duckdb_extension.gz
│   ├── linux_arm64_gcc4
│   │   └── quack.duckdb_extension.gz
│   ├── osx_amd64
│   │   └── quack.duckdb_extension.gz
│   ├── osx_arm64
│   │   └── quack.duckdb_extension.gz
│   ├── windows_amd64
│   │   └── quack.duckdb_extension.gz
│   └── windows_arm64
│       └── quack.duckdb_extension.gz
└── v1.2.0
    ├── linux_amd64
    │   └── quack.duckdb_extension.gz
    ├── linux_amd64_gcc4
    │   └── quack.duckdb_extension.gz
    ├── linux_arm64
    │   └── quack.duckdb_extension.gz
    ├── linux_arm64_gcc4
    │   └── quack.duckdb_extension.gz
    ├── osx_amd64
    │   └── quack.duckdb_extension.gz
    ├── osx_arm64
    │   └── quack.duckdb_extension.gz
    ├── windows_amd64
    │   └── quack.duckdb_extension.gz
    └── windows_arm64
        └── quack.duckdb_extension.gz

License

Licensed under the MIT License.

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