I think providing purely-functional libraries as system dependencies that's tied to the whole tool chain at the time was the wrong decision by the Unix world.

The system libraries should only ship system stuff: interaction with the OS (I/O, graphics basics, process management), accessing network (DNS, IP and TLS). They should have stable APIs and ABIs.

Windows isn't hostile. It has a differnt paradigm and Unix (or more correctly usually GNU/Linux) people do not want to give up their worldview.

PCRE is basically only your apps's dependency. It has nothing else to do the rest of the operating system. So it is your responsibility to know how to build and package it.

If you depend on a library and can't figure out how you would compile against it, it's probably better for the end user that you don't make anything because you'll still need to package it up later unless you link statically.

I suspect the pitfall is how you or the zig compiler is linking. Unless you're involving things which vary by OS like hardware interaction, networking, file systems etc, you should not, with a new Lang in 2026, need to do anything special for cross-platform capabilities.

System wide dependencies is fundamentally an awful idea that is wrong and you should never ever do it.

All dependencies should be vendored into your project.