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ZIG

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

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

Build Status Build status

Dependencies

Build Dependencies

These compile tools must be available on your system and are used to build the Zig compiler itself:

POSIX
  • gcc >= 5.0.0 or clang >= 3.6.0
  • cmake >= 2.8.5
Windows
  • Microsoft Visual Studio 2015

Library Dependencies

These libraries must be installed on your system, with the development files available. The Zig compiler links against them. You have to use the same compiler for these libraries as you do to compile Zig.

  • LLVM, Clang, and LLD libraries == 6.x

Debug / Development Build

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@6
brew outdated llvm@6 || brew upgrade llvm@6
mkdir build
cd build
cmake .. -DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH=/usr/local/opt/llvm@6/ -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

Release / Install Build

Once installed, ZIG_LIBC_LIB_DIR and ZIG_LIBC_INCLUDE_DIR can be overridden by the --libc-lib-dir and --libc-include-dir parameters to the zig binary.

mkdir build
cd build
cmake .. -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -DZIG_LIBC_LIB_DIR=/some/path -DZIG_LIBC_INCLUDE_DIR=/some/path -DZIG_LIBC_STATIC_INCLUDE_DIR=/some/path
make
sudo make install

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.

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