A programming language designed for robustness, optimality, and clarity.

ziglang.org

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. Zig binaries do not depend on libc unless explicitly linked.
• Optional type instead of null pointers.
• Safe unions, tagged unions, and C ABI compatible 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 which eliminates the need for a preprocessor or macros.
• The binaries produced by Zig have complete debugging information so you can, for example, use GDB, MSVC, or LLDB 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.

Community

• IRC: #zig on Freenode (Channel Logs).
• Reddit: /r/zig
• Email list: ziglang@googlegroups.com

Building

Stage 1: Build Zig from C++ Source Code

Dependencies

POSIX

• cmake >= 2.8.5
• gcc >= 5.0.0 or clang >= 3.6.0
• LLVM, Clang, LLD development libraries == 7.x, compiled with the same gcc or clang version above
  • These depend on zlib and libxml2.

Windows

• cmake >= 2.8.5
• Microsoft Visual Studio 2015
• LLVM, Clang, LLD development libraries == 7.x, compiled with the same MSVC version above

Instructions

POSIX

MacOS

Windows

See https://github.com/ziglang/zig/wiki/Building-Zig-on-Windows

Stage 2: Build Self-Hosted Zig from Zig Source Code

Note: Stage 2 compiler is not complete. Beta users of Zig should use the Stage 1 compiler for now.

Dependencies are the same as Stage 1, except now you have a working zig compiler.

This produces ./stage2/bin/zig which can be used for testing and development. Once it is feature complete, it will be used to build stage 3 - the final compiler binary.

Stage 3: Rebuild Self-Hosted Zig Using the Self-Hosted Compiler

This is the actual compiler binary that we will install to the system.

Note: Stage 2 compiler is not yet able to build Stage 3. Building Stage 3 is not yet supported.

Debug / Development Build

Release / Install Build