zig lang

An experiment in writing a low-level programming language with the intent to replace C. Zig intends to be a small language, yet powerful enough to write optimal, readable, safe, and concise code to solve any computing problem.

Porting a C project to Zig should be a pleasant experience - every C feature needs a corresponding Zig feature which solves the problem equivalently or better.

Zig is not afraid to roll the major version number of the language if it improves simplicity, fixes poor design decisions, or adds a new feature which compromises backward compatibility.

Goals

• Completely compatible with C libraries with no wrapper necessary.
• In addition to creating executables, creating a C library is a primary use case. You can export an auto-generated .h file.
• Do not depend on libc unless explicitly linked.
• Provide standard library which competes with the C standard library and is always compiled against statically in source form.
• Generics so that one can write efficient data structures that work for any data type.
• No null pointer. Convenient syntax for dealing with a maybe type so that null pointer is not missed.
• An error type, combined with some syntatical constructs which makes writing robust code convenient and straightforward.
• Eliminate the need for configure, make, cmake, etc.
• Eliminate the need for header files (when using zig internally).
• Tagged union enum type. No more accidentally reading the wrong union field.
• Easy to parse language so that humans and machines have no trouble with the syntax.
• Eliminate the preprocessor, but (most) everything you can accomplish with the preprocessor, you can accomplish directly in the language.
• Ability to mark functions as test and automatically run them in test mode. Automatically provide test coverage.
• Friendly toward package maintainers.
• Ability to declare dependencies as Git URLS with commit locking (can provide a tag or sha1).
• Include documentation generator.
• Shebang line OK so language can be used for "scripting" as well.
• Debug mode optimizes for fast compilation time and crashing when undefined behavior would happen.
• Release mode produces heavily optimized code. What other projects call "Link Time Optimization" Zig does automatically.

Current Status

• Have a look in the example/ folder to see some code examples.
• Most language features are available, but many edge cases and errors are not yet implemented.
• Linux x86_64 is supported.
• Building for the native target is supported.
• Optimized machine code that Zig produces is indistinguishable from optimized machine code produced from equivalent C program.
• Zig can generate dynamic libraries, executables, object files, and C header files.
• The binaries produced by Zig have complete debugging information so you can, for example, use GDB to debug your software.

Building

Dependencies

• LLVM 3.7
• libclang 3.7

Debug / Development Build

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

mkdir build
cd build
cmake .. -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=$(pwd) -DZIG_LIBC_DIR=$(dirname $(cc -print-file-name=crt1.o))
make
make install
./run_tests

Release / Install Build

Once installed, ZIG_LIBC_DIR can be overridden by the --libc-path parameter to the zig binary.

mkdir build
cd build
cmake .. -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -DZIG_LIBC_DIR=path/to/libc/dir
make
sudo make install

Troubleshooting

If you get one of these:

undefined reference to `_ZNK4llvm17SubtargetFeatures9getStringB5cxx11Ev'
undefined reference to `llvm::SubtargetFeatures::getString() const'

This is because of C++'s Dual ABI. Most likely LLVM was compiled with one compiler while Zig was compiled with a different one, for example GCC vs clang.

To fix this, you have 2 options:

• Compile Zig with the same compiler that LLVM was compiled with.
• Add -DZIG_LLVM_OLD_CXX_ABI=yes to the cmake configure line.