Zig
| Zig (programminglanguage) | |
|---|---|
| Full Name | Zig |
| Short Name | Zig |
| Description | Zig is a general-purpose programming language and toolchain for maintaining robust, optimal and reusable software |
| Company | Zig Software Foundation |
| Web | No |
| Mobile | No |
| Enterprise | Yes |
| Embedded | Yes |
What is Zig?
Zig is a statically-typed, general-purpose programming language designed for robustness, performance, and maintainability. It aims to be a pragmatic language that enables developers to write efficient, reliable, and secure code.
Who created Zig?
Zig was created by Andrew Kelley, who started the project in 2015.
What platforms does Zig support?
Zig is a cross-platform language that supports Windows, macOS, Linux, FreeBSD, and more.
What are some key features of Zig?
Zig has a number of features that make it unique, including compile-time code execution, optional null safety, built-in error handling, and low-level control over memory allocation and deallocation.
What libraries and tools are available for Zig?
There are a number of libraries and tools available for Zig, including the Zig standard library, which provides a range of useful functions and data types, as well as third-party libraries for networking, graphics, and more. The Zig community also maintains a package manager called “zkg” to facilitate easy package installation and management.
What kind of projects is Zig well-suited for?
Zig is well-suited for projects that require high performance, low-level control over memory and system resources, and a strong focus on reliability and correctness. It's also a good choice for system programming, command-line utilities, and tools that need to interact with low-level system components.
Is Zig a beginner-friendly language?
While Zig has a relatively small learning curve compared to other low-level programming languages, it's not necessarily beginner-friendly. Developers with experience in C or other low-level languages may find it easier to pick up, but it may be more challenging for beginners who are new to programming.
- Snippet from Wikipedia: Zig (programming language)
Zig (Also known as Ziglang) is an imperative, general-purpose, statically typed, compiled system programming language designed by Andrew Kelley. It is free and open-source software, released under an MIT License.
A major goal of the language is to improve on the C language, (also taking inspiration from Rust), with the intent of being even smaller and simpler to program in, while offering more functionality. The improvements in language simplicity relate to flow control, function calls, library imports, variable declaration and Unicode support. Further, the language makes no use of macros or preprocessor instructions. Features adopted from modern languages include the addition of compile time generic programming data types, allowing functions to work on a variety of data, along with a small set of new compiler directives to allow access to the information about those types using reflective programming (reflection). Like C, Zig omits garbage collection, and has manual memory management. To help eliminate the potential errors that arise in such systems, it includes option types, a simple syntax for using them, and a unit testing framework built into the language. Zig has many features for low-level programming, notably packed structs (structs without padding between fields), arbitrary-width integers and multiple pointer types.
The main drawback of the system is that, although Zig has a growing community, as of 2025, it remains a new language with areas for improvement in maturity, ecosystem and tooling. Also the learning curve for Zig can be steep, especially for those unfamiliar with low-level programming concepts. The availability of learning resources is limited for complex use cases, though this is gradually improving as interest and adoption increase. Other challenges mentioned by the reviewers are interoperability with other languages (extra effort to manage data marshaling and communication is required), as well as manual memory deallocation (disregarding proper memory management results directly in memory leaks).
The development is funded by the Zig Software Foundation (ZSF), a non-profit corporation with Andrew Kelley as president, which accepts donations and hires multiple full-time employees. Zig has very active contributor community, and is still in its early stages of development. Despite this, a Stack Overflow survey in 2024 found that Zig software developers earn salaries of $103,000 USD per year on average, making it one of the best-paying programming languages. However, only 0.83% reported they were proficient in Zig.
GitHub Topics
Zig is a general-purpose programming language and toolchain for maintaining robust, optimal, and reusable software. Focus on debugging your application rather than debugging your programming language knowledge. There is no hidden control flow, no hidden memory allocations, no preprocessor, and no macros.
Hello World
const std = @import("std");
pub fn main() !void {
const stdout = std.io.getStdOut().writer();
try stdout.print("Hello, {s}!\n", .{"world"});
}
Source: Wikibooks
See also: Programming Languages