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Table Of Contents
Systems Programming with Zig
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The transformation of semi-structured JSON into a relational database requires a bridge between dynamic input and static types. In systems programming, we prefer this bridge to be built at compile time to avoid the overhead of a heavy runtime or a complex reflection engine. The naive approach — parsing JSON into a generic tagged union and then manually extracting fields — produces brittle code where every column name appears in at least three places: the struct definition, the JSON extraction, and the SQL binding. A single schema change breaks all three sites independently. By shifting the work of field mapping from the execution phase to the compilation phase, we ensure that the resulting machine code is as direct as if we had written a specialized routine for every table in our schema, while the source code maintains a single point of truth. The Event struct is that single point of truth. It is the only declaration that needs to change...