Zig by Example

A hands-on introduction to Zig via annotated examples. Zig is a general-purpose, compiled systems language focused on robustness, optimality, and simplicity — no hidden control flow, no hidden allocations, no preprocessor.

Written by Dariush Abbasi for Boring College

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Layout

• content/NN-name.md — the annotated chapter
• examples/NN-name.zig — the runnable source

Every code block in content/ mirrors the matching examples/*.zig file and has been compiled against the target Zig version.

Index

1. Hello, World
2. Values
3. Variables
4. Integers
5. Floats
6. Strings
7. Arrays
8. Slices
9. Vectors
10. Structs
11. Enums
12. Unions
13. Functions
14. Blocks and Statements
15. If / Else
16. Switch
17. While Loops
18. For Loops
19. Defer
20. Errors
21. Optionals
22. Pointers
23. Multi-Pointers
24. Slices (Pointers)
25. Comptime
26. Generics
27. Memory Allocation
28. ArrayList
29. HashMap
30. Linked List
31. Testing
32. Formatting and Print
33. Io Interface — new in 0.16
34. Writer & Reader — new
35. File I/O
36. Threading & Concurrency — new
37. Processes
38. Networking & HTTP — new
39. JSON
40. Random Numbers
41. Sorting
42. Math
43. Build System
44. C Interop

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Running the examples

Install Zig 0.16.0 — brew install zig on macOS, or grab a tarball from ziglang.org/download. Then:

$ zig run examples/01-hello-world.zig
Hello, World!

A few examples need extra flags:

$ zig test examples/31-testing.zig            # tests
$ zig run  examples/44-c-interop.zig -lc      # link libc

Further Reading

• Zig Official Documentation
• Zig Standard Library Source
• Zig 0.15.1 Release Notes — Writergate, unmanaged collections
• Zig 0.16.0 Release Notes — the Io interface
• Ziglings — exercises

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Zig by Example is inspired by Go by Example by Mark McGranaghan. Examples target Zig 0.16.

Contributions welcome — see CONTRIBUTING.md.