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zig/README.md
Andrew Kelley 05198e0321 readme update
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ZIG

A system programming language which prioritizes optimality, safety, and readability.

Zig is a small, simple language, yet powerful. Zig fits into the same niche as C, except does everything better.

Zig 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.

ziglang.org

Feature Highlights

  • Compatible with C libraries with no wrapper necessary. Directly include C .h files and get access to the functions and symbols therein.
  • Compile units do not depend on libc unless explicitly linked.
  • Provides standard library which competes with the C standard library and is always compiled against statically in source form.
  • Pointer types do not allow the null value. Instead you can use a maybe type which has several syntactic constructs to ensure that the null pointer is not missed.
  • Provides an error type with several syntatic constructs which makes writing robust code convenient and straightforward. Writing correct code is easier than writing buggy code.
  • No header files required. Top level declarations are entirely order-independent.
  • Compile-time code execution. Compile-time reflection.
  • Partial compile-time function evaluation with eliminates the need for a preprocessor or macros.
  • Tagged union enum type. No more accidentally reading the wrong union field.
  • Generics so that one can write efficient data structures that work for any data type.
  • Easy to parse language so that humans and machines have no trouble with the syntax.
  • The binaries produced by Zig have complete debugging information so you can, for example, use GDB to debug your software.
  • Debug mode optimizes for fast compilation time and crashing when undefined behavior would happen.
  • Release mode produces heavily optimized code. What other projects call "Link Time Optimization" Zig does automatically.
  • Mark functions as tests and automatically run them 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.
  • Zig Build System competes with make, cmake, autotools, SCons, etc.
  • In addition to creating executables, creating a C library is a primary use case. You can export an auto-generated .h file.
  • Currently supported architectures:
    • x86_64
  • Currently supported operating systems:
    • linux
    • freestanding
  • Support for all popular operating systems and architectures is planned.

Community

Building

Build Status

Dependencies

Build Dependencies

These compile tools must be available on your system and are used to build the Zig compiler itself:

  • gcc >= 5.0.0 or clang >= 3.6.0
  • cmake >= 2.8.5

Library Dependencies

These libraries must be installed on your system, with the development files available. The Zig compiler dynamically links against them.

  • LLVM, Clang, and LLD libraries == 4.x

Debug / Development Build

If you have gcc or clang installed, you can find out what ZIG_LIBC_LIB_DIR, ZIG_LIBC_STATIC_LIB_DIR, and ZIG_LIBC_INCLUDE_DIR should be set to (example below).

For MacOS, ZIG_LIBC_LIB_DIR and ZIG_LIBC_STATIC_LIB_DIR are unused.

mkdir build
cd build
cmake .. -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=$(pwd) -DZIG_LIBC_LIB_DIR=$(dirname $(cc -print-file-name=crt1.o)) -DZIG_LIBC_INCLUDE_DIR=$(echo -n | cc -E -x c - -v 2>&1 | grep -B1 "End of search list." | head -n1 | cut -c 2- | sed "s/ .*//") -DZIG_LIBC_STATIC_LIB_DIR=$(dirname $(cc -print-file-name=crtbegin.o))
make
make install
./zig build --build-file ../build.zig test

Release / Install Build

Once installed, ZIG_LIBC_LIB_DIR and ZIG_LIBC_INCLUDE_DIR can be overridden by the --libc-lib-dir and --libc-include-dir parameters to the zig binary.

mkdir build
cd build
cmake .. -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -DZIG_LIBC_LIB_DIR=/some/path -DZIG_LIBC_INCLUDE_DIR=/some/path -DZIG_LIBC_STATIC_INCLUDE_DIR=/some/path
make
sudo make install

Test Coverage

To see test coverage in Zig, configure with -DZIG_TEST_COVERAGE=ON as an additional parameter to the Debug build.

You must have lcov installed and available.

Then make coverage.

With GCC you will get a nice HTML view of the coverage data. With clang, the last step will fail, but you can execute llvm-cov gcov $(find CMakeFiles/ -name "*.gcda") and then inspect the produced .gcov files.

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