Zig Programming Language

Created: Apr 13, 2020 by Pradeep Gowda — Updated:Aug 01, 2024 — Tagged: programming-language · zig .

The Zig Programming Language is an open-source programming language designed for robustness, optimality, and clarity.

Introduction

Introduction to the Zig Programming Language - Andrew Kelley
zig in 30 minutes; HN; Jan 2021.
Learning Zig by Karl Seguin.

Code

Learning

An Introduction to Zig

Articles

Porting Zig to NetBSD - a fun, speedy port
Iterative Replacement of C with Zig
How Zig Do?
Zig Learn
Zig – Mitchell Hashimoto and writing
Zig And Rust by Alex Kladov/matklad
Zig Quirks
Ziggifying Kilo; Apr 2023.
When Zig is safer and faster than Rust; Mar 2023.
Problems of C, and how Zig addresses them; Jun 2023.
Why I am not yet ready to switch to Zig from Rust | by Pekka Enberg | Jun, 2024 | Medium
Why Zig Clicks; Mar 2021
- A small core
  - tagged unions
  - optionals
  - automatic deserialization to structs
  - type checked string formatting
- Local Reasoning
- Generics
- C interop
- RAII

Project Management

Mastering project management in Zig from orhun’s blog.

FFI

(2) Exporting C APIs from Zig, D, and Nim - YouTube

Twitter

Andrew K: Friendly challenge for Go programmers:

Provide or link to a small (50-200 ish lines) idiomatic Go program demonstrating concurrency. (Elegant use of goroutines, channels, etc)

I’ll provide the equivalent Zig program using async/await and std.event.Loop for comparison.

My notes

Cross compiling zig

Code

# crosscompile.zig
const warn = @import("std").debug.warn;

pub fn main() void {
    warn("Hello, world!\n");
}

Compiling natively on Mac OSX

$ zig build-exe crosscompile.zig
$ file crosscompile
crosscompile: Mach-O 64-bit executable x86_64

Cross-compiling for Linux

The C ABI tuple of (operating system, architecture, C compiler environment) is defined by --target-os --target-arch --target-environ flags of zig. [ref]

zig build-exe crosscompile.zig --target-os linux --target-arch x86_64

Verify the executable file type created:

$ file crosscompile
crosscompile: ELF 64-bit LSB executable, x86-64, version 1 (SYSV), statically linked, with debug_info, not stripped