It won't require build.zig, you'll just have to run zig translate-c on the C file. Andrew's comment here[1] says that @cImport is basically @import + the compiler implicitly running translate-c for you. There was some discussion of removing the translate-c subcommand as well (which would force you to use build.zig), but I don't think it's been decided to do that.

[1] https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/20630#issuecomment-225...