What Zig Is and Why It Exists

A simple, explicit systems language

Zig is a general-purpose systems programming language and toolchain created by Andrew Kelley (first public release in 2016) and developed by the non-profit Zig Software Foundation. It aims to be a better C: as fast and low-level, but simpler and safer. Its design principles are no hidden control flow (no operator overloading, no exceptions, no implicit function calls such as destructors), no hidden memory allocations (functions that allocate take an allocator parameter), explicit error handling with error unions, and compile-time code execution (comptime) instead of a macro system or separate generics language. Zig has optional safety checks (bounds, integer overflow, null) that are on in debug and safe builds. It interoperates with C directly: it can import C headers, and its toolchain includes a drop-in C/C++ compiler (zig cc) with easy cross-compilation to many targets. Notable Zig projects include the Bun JavaScript runtime, the TigerBeetle financial database and the Ghostty terminal. Zig is pre-1.0: the language and especially the standard library still change between releases, so always check the documentation for the version you use.

Zig's design principles

Explicit control flow, explicit allocation, explicit errors and compile-time execution.

Hello, Zig

A first program with a type-safe formatted print.

const std = @import("std");

pub fn main() void {
    const language = "Zig";
    const year: u32 = 2016;

    // std.debug.print writes to stderr; arguments are an anonymous tuple
    std.debug.print("Hello from {s}, first released in {d}!\n", .{ language, year });

    var total: u32 = 0;
    for (1..11) |n| {          // 1 to 10 inclusive (the range end is exclusive)
        total += @as(u32, @intCast(n));  // n is usize; checked conversion to u32 in safe modes
    }
    std.debug.print("Sum of 1..10 = {d}\n", .{total});
}

// zig run hello.zig

Note the version you learn

The examples in this course target Zig 0.15. The core language is fairly stable, but standard library APIs (I/O, containers, the build system) change between releases. When an example does not compile, check the release notes first.

त्वरित जाँच: Which is a core Zig design principle?

• No hidden control flow and no hidden allocations
• Hidden memory allocations for convenience
• Exceptions for all errors
• Garbage collection