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Description

Zig is a general-purpose programming language and toolchain for maintaining robust, optimal, and reusable software.

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.