#242·tini

Move to Zig for smaller static binary?

Author: blenessyCreated Dec 30, 2025Updated Jun 20, 2026

I was a big under-stimulated during X-mas break and decided to port tini to Zig (0.15.2). The experience was very smooth (took me roughly 20h) to port and get all tests passing.

You can checkout my fork here and the following commit message regarding how to build it: https://github.com/blenessy/tini/commit/b34e39d54f22b53730d6bfe97c950b1e63fe16cf

Please let me know if you are open for a PR - then I'll invest more time in changing the rest of the files (build system, scripts, README.md, etc.).

Why?

There are other advantages over C, but this is the biggest win:

  • static binary size went down to 44KiB.

Why not Rust ?

  • Nothing wrong with it, but I prefer simpler languages (python, zig, golang).