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.

ziglang.org

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.

Related Projects

• zig-mode - Emacs integration
• zig.vim - Vim configuration files