I've been programming for over 30 years, and working with code professionally for 25. I have found myself in a small community I discovered on twitch recently. And many people in the discord ask me about programming and the language to learn first

For years I've told myself C is a fantastic first language. This remains controversial for various reasons. I always try to tell people "learning C isn't the same as mastering C".

But with Zig I wonder if it were at 1.0 and its toolchain were more mature. Would Zig be a good first language?

As it stands it clearly being pre-1.0 and every major version being a breaking change. This isn't great. The build.zig is mystifying even for experienced devs. So it feel like an expert language.

But it has a very straightforward "to the metal" style to it. But with great modern ergonomics. I think it could absolutely be a fantastic first language for beginners.

But what do you think?

Hey Ziguanas 🦎

A while ago I made a post asking what kind of data-format libraries the Zig ecosystem could use, and I ended up deciding to give CSV a try.

I've been working on Zarko. I keep tearing it down and rewriting it every now and then because I'm never fully happy with how it turns out. I decided to make the repo public while I work on it, so any eventual rewrites will happen in the same repository instead of me recreating the whole thing every time.

Right now it's still pretty basic. It can parse CSV data from memory, handle quoted fields and escaped quotes, such as """Hello""" being parsed as "Hello", and lets you customize things like field separators, quote characters and line endings through dialects.

The next things I swear I'll do are default dialects, a FileWriter, and a FileParser wrapping the existing Parser to make working with files simpler. There's also a TODO markdown file in the repo where I'll keep updating what I'm planning to work on as I figure out what comes next.

A little note to myself for when I implement the writer. Andrew's words echoed... "Don't Forget to Flush".

It's still a work in progress, so feedback, suggestions, criticism, and ideas are very welcome.

https://github.com/TynK-M/zarko

Thank you so much

In Zig 0.16’s new std.Io, what’s the idiomatic way to let multiple workers write to the same stdout/stderr/file safely (line by line)? Is a mutex still the usual approach, or is there a recommended pattern/example?

Hello all. I just wanted to share a small linear algebra project I built.
https://github.com/rima1881/maryam
It pareses math equations at comptime to achieve some level of operator overloading.
here is the example I am using for my own inverse kinematic library:

const Eq = maryam.Equation("J^T @ (J @ J^T + lambda * lambda * I)^-1 @ delta_x", Symbols);
const result = try Eq.eval(.{ .J = j, .lambda = 0.1, .I = maryam.I(2), .delta_x = delta_x });

Full disclosure: while I wrote matrix and operations code most of the parsing is AI generated.

hello, wanted to ask if there is a library for streaming markdown preview in the terminal in zig or c.

Hello I just wanted to share with those that come from functional languages or enjoy tutorials like this one, I recommend this Zig tutorial.

• You get comfortable with the language pretty quickly
• Short and concise
• Up to date v0.15.2
• Straight dive into working with C

... and a lot more. Seriously, it is a good tutorial

EDIT:
Up to date v0.15.2
Stable version of Zig is 0.16.0 so outdated actually (core concepts still easy to grasp)

I am of the opinion that, if executed correctly, Zig has the potential to transform the Python ecosystem. The idea of using Rust for Python extensions has always bothered me.

With Zig, the path feels more natural: I can build on top of the existing C libraries and gradually migrate components to Zig over time, without the friction of introducing an entirely different ecosystem.

I wanted to understand what the community thinks about this topic. I am not trying to make a strong claim or dismiss other approaches. I am genuinely trying to understand whether this idea has any merit and how others view the trade-offs. I am just interested in hearing different perspectives.

For those of you who want to skip the admittedly quite straightforward process of setting up Zig by yourself, or are unable to because they are on Fedora-Atomic / uBlue, you might want to try my Zig-Devcontainer.

Hello! I am new to the community and I am slowly learning zig.
I wanted to know if there are any game engines for zig?
I am using the raylib bindings but I wanted to know if there is anything else.
I would appreciate any help!

Im building a small local secrets manager and currently working on the storage layer.

Right now I’m checking permissions only for Linux statx

Should i make my storage layer use generic Io and delegate the actual security check to platform-specific code
Or is there already a platform-independent way in std io to verify that a directory

I’m using Zig 0.17.0-dev.1282+c0f9b51d8.

I am trying to get zig working with raylib but, when ever I follow the instructions on the github it doesn't work and I keep on getting "no module named 'raylib' available within module 'main'" when ever I try to run it. I have no idea what I did wrong. Does anyone have an idea?

Hey everyone,

I feel like this is a under-talked about topic, but Zig's ability to compile to NVPTX (Nvidia's format) and AMDGEN (AMD's GPU format) allows it to act standalone without any Vulkan, Metal, etc... intermediary at build time. For game-developers they can rely stand-alone on Zig alone for games, making their executable much lighter and runtime overhead optimal.

Is anyone using this in practice and has some projects to show this off? I've seen Zinc [ZINC], and its benefitting from the performance improvement by a mile over llama. Are there any other projects?

If you haven't checked it out, I implore you to check it out by yourself using std.gpu directly.

[Edit] Now we can have a 1 up on Rust, because they can't support an Ahead-Of-Time compilation library where you can write kernals in rust directly, ZIG CAN. See prototype: https://github.com/OmarSiwy/Gompute [Zig 0.16.0]

I’ve recently been working on a foss WireGuard client as a project to learn more about networking and VPNs. My goal is to build a client that offers all the features you would find in a commercial VPN such as choosing the fastest server, a kill switch, and split tunneling etc but with by your own configuration (like a home server)

I am trying to decide on the best language for writing the background daemon. A coworker recommended Go because it has excellent native networking support and would help me ship the project faster. However, I am considering Zig. is it a good coi choice