msfjarvis.dev/content/posts/first-steps-with-zig.md

+++ categories = ["zig"] date = 2021-05-14 description = "I decided to learn Zig, and here's how I'm preparing for it." slug = "first-steps-with-zig" tags = ["zig", "learn"] title = "First steps with Zig" +++

Zig is a systems programming language much akin to Rust and C, and has been showing up in my feeds a lot as of late. Many Zig programmers have documented their experience with Zig as much better than with Rust, which I have been programming in for the last year or so, citing simplicity and ease. I tend to agree that Rust can often be complex to enforce the guarantee of being correct, so I set out to finally buy into the promise of Zig and give it a shot.

Compiler and IDE setup

The installing Zig page recommends that while using the Zig stable releases is fine for evaluating it, their stable release cadence matches LLVM's ~6 months which means they often rendered outdated by the fast pace of Zig development.

Since I wanted to stick with using Nix to manage my temporary Zig environment, I went with the stable 0.7.1 release available on nixpkgs.

A quick nix-shell -p zig later, I now had access to the Zig compiler

➜ nix-shell -p zig
➜ zig version
0.7.1

To be able to use VSCode for writing Zig, I also installed the official zls language server for Zig. This did get me go-to-declaration support for the standard library, but not syntax highlighting.

Learning resources

The Zig team frankly admits that they do not have the resources to maintain extensive learning resources yet, but did link to ziglearn.org which seems like the next best thing. There is a rustlings counterpart in ziglings, and the standard library reference also exists along with a language reference for people who prefer to learn that way. There's something for everyone, and you'll notice most of the good learning content is community sourced as opposed to Rust which has an official book and maintains the rustlings repository as a first-party member of the Rust ecosystem.

Your first program

The zig CLI contains commands to generate new projects easily, so let's create a new binary project.

➜ zig init-exe
info: Created build.zig
info: Created src/main.zig
info: Next, try `zig build --help` or `zig build run`

The build.zig file presumably describes to the zig CLI how to build this program, and src/main.zig is our application code. Here's what zig init-exe gives you for a "hello world" program:

const std = @import("std");

pub fn main() anyerror!void {
    std.log.info("All your codebase are belong to us.", .{});
}

Cheeky.

This post is just a brief overview of how I went about setting things up for learning Zig. I intend to post more detailed blogs as I progress :)