ADR 25: Rename the project to clj-zig

Date: 2026-06-16

Supersedes ADR 01.

Context

ADR 01 named the experiment Zigar before any code existed. Two established projects already hold that name: chung-leong/zigar, a JavaScript-to-Zig toolkit, and GuneshRaj/zigar, a Zig web framework. A Clojure library sharing their name would collide in search, in package coordinates, and in conversation, and the JavaScript toolkit occupies the same Zig-interop niche, so the clash is substantive rather than incidental.

The project is not published anywhere yet: no Clojars release, no external dependants. Renaming now costs only an internal sweep; renaming after publication would break coordinates other people depend on.

clj-zig is free on Clojars and on GitHub, and it states what the library is without a pun: Clojure functions backed by compiled Zig.

Decision

Rename the project from Zigar to clj-zig. The namespace root zigar becomes clj-zig (clj-zig.core, clj-zig.signature, and the rest); the main namespace is clj-zig, aliased zig. Error-code keywords :zigar/... become :clj-zig/.... The on-disk cache directory .zigar/cache becomes .clj-zig/cache.

The generated C symbol prefix zigar_ becomes clj_zig_, with an underscore, because a Zig identifier cannot contain a hyphen.

What does not change: :zig/... diagnostic codes that name the Zig compiler, the zig require alias, and the word "Zig" wherever it names the language. No backwards-compatibility shims are kept, since nothing public depends on the old names.

Consequences

Repository, package-coordinate, and badge URLs move to leifericf/clj-zig and io.github.leifericf/clj-zig. Renaming the GitHub repository is a manual step taken outside the codebase; GitHub redirects the old URLs.

The Clojure namespace clj-zig carries a hyphen, so its munged forms diverge from the source word in two places that bare prose does not show: the on-disk path is clj_zig (Clojure munges the hyphen to an underscore), and the symbol fragment for the namespace inside a generated C symbol is clj_2d_zig (the symbol munger escapes the hyphen as its hex code). Both are deterministic, so the content-addressed cache key stays stable.

The Zigar name jokes recorded in ADR 01 retire with the name; clj-zig is plainly descriptive and carries no pun.

Alternatives

Keep Zigar. Rejected: the two existing projects make the name ambiguous, and the cost of changing it only rises after publication.

cljzig, with no separator. Rejected: it reads as one opaque token and loses the immediate clj plus zig decomposition that makes clj-zig self-describing.

A generic zig.* namespace root. Rejected: it would collide with the zig alias the public API already uses and would claim a namespace broad enough to clash with any other Clojure-Zig effort.