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closes #347 also add std.os.path.relative |
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README.md |
A system programming language which prioritizes optimality, safety, and readability.
Zig is a small, simple language, yet powerful. Zig fits into the same niche as C, except does everything better.
Zig 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.
Feature Highlights
- 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.
- Provides an error type with several syntatic constructs which makes writing robust code convenient and straightforward. Writing correct code is easier than writing buggy code.
- 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.
- Debug mode optimizes for fast compilation time and crashing with a stack trace when undefined behavior would happen.
- Release mode produces heavily optimized code. What other projects call "Link Time Optimization" Zig does automatically.
- Mark functions as tests and automatically run them 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.
- Zig Build System competes with make, cmake, autotools, SCons, etc.
- In addition to creating executables, creating a C library is a primary use case. You can export an auto-generated .h file.
- Standard library supports Operating System abstractions for:
x86_64
linux
- Support for all popular operating systems and architectures is planned.
- For OS development, Zig supports all architectures that LLVM does. All the standard library that does not depend on an OS is available to you in freestanding mode.
Community
- IRC:
#zig
on Freenode. - Reddit: /r/zig
- Email list: ziglang@googlegroups.com
Building
Dependencies
Build Dependencies
These compile tools must be available on your system and are used to build the Zig compiler itself:
- gcc >= 5.0.0 or clang >= 3.6.0
- cmake >= 2.8.5
Library Dependencies
These libraries must be installed on your system, with the development files available. The Zig compiler links against them.
- LLVM, Clang, and LLD libraries == 4.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).
For MacOS, ZIG_LIBC_LIB_DIR
and ZIG_LIBC_STATIC_LIB_DIR
are unused.
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
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.