Welcome to Ziglings! This project contains a series of tiny broken programs (and one nasty surprise). By fixing them, you'll learn how to read and write Zig code.
Those broken programs need your help! (You'll also save the planet from evil aliens and help some friendly elephants stick together, which is very sweet of you.)
This project was directly inspired by the brilliant and fun rustlings project for the Rust language. Indirect inspiration comes from Ruby Koans and the Little LISPer/Little Schemer series of books.
This will probably be difficult if you've never programmed before. But no specific programming experience is required. And in particular, you are not expected to have any prior experience with "systems programming" or a "systems" level language such as C.
Each exercise is self-contained and self-explained. However, you're encouraged to also check out these Zig language resources for more detail:
Also, the Zig community is incredibly friendly and helpful!
Install a development build of the Zig compiler. (See the "master" section of the downloads page.)
Verify the installation and build number of zig like so:
$ zig version
0.11.0-dev.2560+xxxxxxxxx
Clone this repository with Git:
$ git clone https://github.com/ratfactor/ziglings
$ cd ziglings
Then run zig build and follow the instructions to begin!
$ zig build
The Zig language is under very active development. In order to be current,
Ziglings tracks development builds of the Zig compiler rather than
versioned release builds. The last stable release was 0.10.1, but Ziglings
needs a dev build with pre-release version "0.11.0" and a build number at least
as high as that shown in the example version check above.
It is likely that you'll download a build which is greater than the minimum.
(For those who cannot easily update Zig, there are also community-supported branches in this repo. At the moment, there's one for v0.8.1. Older version branches may or may not have all exercises and/or bugfixes.)
Once you have a build of the Zig compiler that works with Ziglings, they'll continue to work together. But keep in mind that if you update one, you may need to also update the other.
Also note that the current "stage 1" Zig compiler is very strict about input: no tab characters or Windows CR/LF newlines are allowed.
Version-0.11.0-dev.2560+602029bb2
- 2023-04-07 zig 0.11.0-dev.2401 - fixes of the new build system - see #212
- 2023-02-21 zig 0.11.0-dev.2157 - changes in
build system- new: parallel processing of the build steps - 2023-02-21 zig 0.11.0-dev.1711 - changes in
for loops- new: Multi-Object For-Loops + Struct-of-Arrays - 2023-02-12 zig 0.11.0-dev.1638 - changes in
std.Buildcache_root now returns a directory struct - 2023-02-04 zig 0.11.0-dev.1568 - changes in
std.Build(combinestd.buildandstd.build.Builderintostd.Build) - 2023-01-14 zig 0.11.0-dev.1302 - changes in
@addWithOverflow(now returns a tuple) and@typeInfo; temporary disabled async functionality - 2022-09-09 zig 0.10.0-dev.3978 - change in
NativeTargetInfo.detectin build - 2022-09-06 zig 0.10.0-dev.3880 - Ex 074 correctly fails again: comptime array len
- 2022-08-29 zig 0.10.0-dev.3685 -
@typeName()output change, stage1 req. for async - 2022-07-31 zig 0.10.0-dev.3385 - std lib string
fmt()option changes - 2022-03-19 zig 0.10.0-dev.1427 - method for getting sentinel of type changed
- 2021-12-20 zig 0.9.0-dev.2025 -
c_voidis nowanyopaque - 2021-06-14 zig 0.9.0-dev.137 - std.build.Id
.Customis now.custom - 2021-04-21 zig 0.8.0-dev.1983 - std.fmt.format()
anyformat string required - 2021-02-12 zig 0.8.0-dev.1065 - std.fmt.format()
s(string) format string required
It can be handy to check just a single exercise or start from a single exercise:
zig build -Dn=19
zig build -Dn=19 start
You can also run without checking for correctness:
zig build -Dn=19 test
Or skip the build system entirely and interact directly with the compiler if you're into that sort of thing:
zig run exercises/001_hello.zig
Calling all wizards: To prepare an executable for debugging, install it to zig-cache/bin with:
zig build -Dn=19 install
To get a list of all possible options, run:
zig build -Dn=19 -l
install Install 019_functions2.zig to prefix path
uninstall Uninstall 019_functions2.zig from prefix path
test Run 019_functions2.zig without checking output
...
The primary goal for Ziglings is to cover the core Zig language.
It would be nice to cover the Standard Library as well, but this is currently challenging because the stdlib is evolving even faster than the core language (and that's saying something!). Not only would stdlib coverage change very rapidly, some exercises might even cease to be relevant entirely.
Having said that, there are some stdlib features that are probably here to stay or are so important to understand that they are worth the extra effort to keep current.
Conspicuously absent from Ziglings are a lot of string manipulation exercises. This is because Zig itself largely avoids dealing with strings. Hopefully there will be an obvious way to address this in the future. The Ziglings crew loves strings!
Zig Core Language
- Hello world (main needs to be public)
- Importing standard library
- Assignment
- Arrays
- Strings
- If
- While
- For
- Functions
- Errors (error/try/catch/if-else-err)
- Defer (and errdefer)
- Switch
- Unreachable
- Enums
- Structs
- Pointers
- Optionals
- Struct methods
- Slices
- Many-item pointers
- Unions
- Numeric types (integers, floats)
- Labelled blocks and loops
- Loops as expressions
- Builtins
- Inline loops
- Comptime
- Sentinel termination
- Quoted identifiers @""
- Anonymous structs/tuples/lists
- Async <--- ironically awaiting upstream Zig updates
- Interfaces
- Bit manipulation
- Working with C
Zig Standard Library
- String formatting
Contributions are very welcome! I'm writing this to teach myself and to create the learning resource I wished for. There will be tons of room for improvement:
- Wording of explanations
- Idiomatic usage of Zig
- Additional exercises
Please see CONTRIBUTING in this repo for the full details.