Zig is an open-source programming language designed for **robustness**, **optimality**, and **maintainability**. **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.