A programming language designed for robustness, optimality, and clarity.

ziglang.org

Documentation

Feature Highlights

• Small, simple language. Focus on debugging your application rather than debugging knowledge of your programming language.
• Ships with a build system that obviates the need for a configure script or a makefile. In fact, existing C and C++ projects may choose to depend on Zig instead of e.g. cmake.
• A fresh take on error handling which makes writing correct code easier than writing buggy code.
• Debug mode optimizes for fast compilation time and crashing with a stack trace when undefined behavior would happen.
• ReleaseFast mode produces heavily optimized code. What other projects call "Link Time Optimization" Zig does automatically.
• Compatible with C libraries with no wrapper necessary. Directly include C .h files and get access to the functions and symbols therein.
• Provides standard library which competes with the C standard library and is always compiled against statically in source form. Compile units do not depend on libc unless explicitly linked.
• Nullable type instead of null pointers.
• Tagged union type instead of raw unions.
• Generics so that one can write efficient data structures that work for any data type.
• No header files required. Top level declarations are entirely order-independent.
• Compile-time code execution. Compile-time reflection.
• Partial compile-time function evaluation with eliminates the need for a preprocessor or macros.
• The binaries produced by Zig have complete debugging information so you can, for example, use GDB to debug your software.
• Built-in unit tests with zig test.
• Friendly toward package maintainers. Reproducible build, bootstrapping process carefully documented. Issues filed by package maintainers are considered especially important.
• Cross-compiling is a primary use case.
• In addition to creating executables, creating a C library is a primary use case. You can export an auto-generated .h file.

Support Table

Freestanding means that you do not directly interact with the OS or you are writing your own OS.

Note that if you use libc or other libraries to interact with the OS, that counts as "freestanding" for the purposes of this table.

	freestanding	linux	macosx	windows	other
i386	OK	planned	OK	OK	planned
x86_64	OK	OK	OK	OK	planned
arm	OK	planned	planned	N/A	planned
aarch64	OK	planned	planned	planned	planned
bpf	OK	planned	planned	N/A	planned
hexagon	OK	planned	planned	N/A	planned
mips	OK	planned	planned	N/A	planned
powerpc	OK	planned	planned	N/A	planned
r600	OK	planned	planned	N/A	planned
amdgcn	OK	planned	planned	N/A	planned
sparc	OK	planned	planned	N/A	planned
s390x	OK	planned	planned	N/A	planned
thumb	OK	planned	planned	N/A	planned
spir	OK	planned	planned	N/A	planned
lanai	OK	planned	planned	N/A	planned

Community

• IRC: #zig on Freenode.
• Reddit: /r/zig
• Email list: ziglang@googlegroups.com

Wanted: Windows Developers

Help get the tests passing on Windows, flesh out the standard library for Windows, streamline Zig installation and distribution for Windows. Work with LLVM and LLD teams to improve PDB/CodeView/MSVC debugging. Implement stack traces for Windows in the MinGW environment and the MSVC environment.

Wanted: MacOS and iOS Developers

Flesh out the standard library for MacOS. Improve the MACH-O linker. Implement stack traces for MacOS. Streamline the process of using Zig to build for iOS.

Wanted: Android Developers

Flesh out the standard library for Android. Streamline the process of using Zig to build for Android and for depending on Zig code on Android.

Wanted: Web Developers

Figure out what are the use cases for compiling Zig to WebAssembly. Create demo projects with it and streamline experience for users trying to output WebAssembly. Work on the documentation generator outputting useful searchable html documentation. Create Zig modules for common web tasks such as WebSockets and gzip.

Wanted: Embedded Developers

Flesh out the standard library for uncommon CPU architectures and OS targets. Drive issue discussion for cross compiling and using Zig in constrained or unusual environments.

Wanted: Game Developers

Create cross platform Zig modules to compete with SDL and GLFW. Create an OpenGL library that does not depend on libc. Drive the usability of Zig for video games. Create a general purpose allocator that does not depend on libc. Create demo games using Zig.

Building

Stage 1: Build Zig from C++ Source Code

Dependencies

POSIX

• gcc >= 5.0.0 or clang >= 3.6.0
• cmake >= 2.8.5
• LLVM, Clang, LLD libraries == 5.x, compiled with the same gcc or clang version above

Windows

• Microsoft Visual Studio 2015
• LLVM, Clang, LLD libraries == 5.x, compiled with the same MSVC version above

Instructions

If you have gcc or clang installed, you can find out what ZIG_LIBC_LIB_DIR, ZIG_LIBC_STATIC_LIB_DIR, and ZIG_LIBC_INCLUDE_DIR should be set to (example below).

mkdir build
cd build
cmake .. -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=$(pwd) -DZIG_LIBC_LIB_DIR=$(dirname $(cc -print-file-name=crt1.o)) -DZIG_LIBC_INCLUDE_DIR=$(echo -n | cc -E -x c - -v 2>&1 | grep -B1 "End of search list." | head -n1 | cut -c 2- | sed "s/ .*//") -DZIG_LIBC_STATIC_LIB_DIR=$(dirname $(cc -print-file-name=crtbegin.o))
make
make install
./zig build --build-file ../build.zig test

MacOS

ZIG_LIBC_LIB_DIR and ZIG_LIBC_STATIC_LIB_DIR are unused.

brew install llvm@5
brew outdated llvm@5 || brew upgrade llvm@5
mkdir build
cd build
cmake .. -DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH=/usr/local/opt/llvm@5/ -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=$(pwd)
make install
./zig build --build-file ../build.zig test

Windows

See https://github.com/zig-lang/zig/wiki/Building-Zig-on-Windows

Stage 2: Build Self-Hosted Zig from Zig Source Code

Note: Stage 2 compiler is not complete. Beta users of Zig should use the Stage 1 compiler for now.

Dependencies are the same as Stage 1, except now you have a working zig compiler.

bin/zig build --build-file ../build.zig --prefix $(pwd)/stage2 install

Stage 3: Rebuild Self-Hosted Zig Using the Self-Hosted Compiler

This is the actual compiler binary that we will install to the system.

Debug / Development Build

./stage2/bin/zig build --build-file ../build.zig --prefix $(pwd)/stage3 install

Release / Install Build

./stage2/bin/zig build --build-file ../build.zig install -Drelease-fast

Test Coverage

To see test coverage in Zig, configure with -DZIG_TEST_COVERAGE=ON as an additional parameter to the Debug build.

You must have lcov installed and available.

Then make coverage.

With GCC you will get a nice HTML view of the coverage data. With clang, the last step will fail, but you can execute llvm-cov gcov $(find CMakeFiles/ -name "*.gcda") and then inspect the produced .gcov files.

Related Projects

• zig-mode - Emacs integration
• zig.vim - Vim configuration files
• vscode-zig - Visual Studio Code extension
• zig-compiler-completions - bash and zsh completions for the zig compiler
• NppExtension - Notepad++ syntax highlighting