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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.