Zig (programming language)

Zig

Paradigms	Multi-paradigm: imperative, concurrent, procedural, functional
Designed by	Andrew Kelley
Developer	Andrew Kelley, Open source
First appeared	2015 (2015)
Preview release	0.6.0 / 13 April 2020 (2020-04-13)
Typing discipline	Static, Strong, Inferred, Structural, Generic
Platform	x86_64, ARM, MIPS, x86, WebAssembly RISC-V
OS	Cross-platform
License	MIT License
Filename extensions	.zig
Website	ziglang.org
Influenced by
C, C++, LLVM IR, Go, Rust

Zig is an imperative, general-purpose, statically typed, systems, compiled programming language designed by Andrew Kelley.. The language is designed for "robustness, optimality and maintainability" , supporting compile-time generics and reflection, cross-compilation and manual memory management.A major goal of the language is to compete with (and improve upon) C, while also taking inspiration from Rust, among others.

Zig has many features for low level programming, notably: packed structs (structs with zero padding between fields), arbitrary width integers and multiple pointer types.

The compiler is written in Zig and C++, using LLVM 10 as a back-end, supporting many of its native targets.The compiler is free and open source software under the MIT License. The Zig compiler exposes the ability to compile C and C++, similar to Clang by using the command "zig cc" and "zig c++", respectively. The Nim programming language supports the use of zig cc as a C compiler.

Examples

Hello World

const std = @import("std");

pub fn main() !void {
    const stdout = std.io.getStdOut().writer();
    try stdout.print("Hello, {}!\n", .{"world"});
}

Generic Linked List

fn LinkedList(comptime T: type) type {
    return struct {
        pub const Node = struct {
            prev: ?*Node,
            next: ?*Node,
            data: T,
        };

        first: ?*Node,
        last:  ?*Node,
        len:   usize,
    };
}

pub fn main() void {
    var node = LinkedList(i32).Node {
        .prev = null,
        .next = null,
        .data = 1234,
    };

    var list = LinkedList(i32) {
        .first = &node,
        .last = &node,
        .len = 1,
    };
}

External links

• Official website
• Zig on GitHub
• Movie: Introducing Zig
• Movie: The Road to 1.0