Chapter 0 - Getting Started

Welcome§

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

Warning: the latest major release is 0.11 - Zig is still pre-1.0; usage in production is still not recommended and you may run into compiler bugs.

To follow this guide, we assume you have:

Prior experience programming
Some understanding of low-level programming concepts

Knowing a language like C, C++, Rust, Go, Pascal or similar will be helpful for following this guide. You should have an editor, terminal and internet connection available to you. This guide is unofficial and unaffiliated with the Zig Software Foundation, and is designed to be read in order from the start.

Installation§

This guide assumes you're using a master build of Zig as opposed to the latest major release, which means downloading a binary from the site or compiling from source; the version of Zig in your package manager is likely outdated. This guide does not support Zig 0.10.1.

Download and extract a prebuilt master binary of Zig from https://ziglang.org/download/.
Add Zig to your path

linux, macos, bsd

Add the location of your Zig binary to your PATH environment variable. For an installation, add export PATH=$PATH:~/zig or similar to your /etc/profile (system-wide) or $HOME/.profile. If these changes do not apply immediately, run the line from your shell. - windows

a) System wide (admin powershell)

[Environment]::SetEnvironmentVariable(
   "Path",
   [Environment]::GetEnvironmentVariable("Path", "Machine") + ";C:\your-path\zig-windows-x86_64-your-version",
   "Machine"
)

b) User level (powershell)

[Environment]::SetEnvironmentVariable(
   "Path",
   [Environment]::GetEnvironmentVariable("Path", "User") + ";C:\your-path\zig-windows-x86_64-your-version",
   "User"
)

Close your terminal and create a new one.

Verify your install with zig version. The output should look something like
```
$ zig version
0.11.0-dev.2777+b95cdf0ae
```
(optional, third party) For completions and go-to-definition in your editor, install the Zig Language Server from https://github.com/zigtools/zls/.
(optional) Join a Zig community.

Hello World§

Create a file called main.zig, with the following contents:

const std = @import("std");

pub fn main() void {
    std.debug.print("Hello, {s}!\n", .{"World"});
}

note: make sure your file is encoded via UTF-8 encoding!

note: If you are using tabs for indentation and/or CRLF line endings in your file, Zig compiler will accept it, but using zig fmt will canonicalize them to spaces and LF line endings!

Use zig run main.zig to build and run it. In this example Hello, World! will be written to stderr, and is assumed to never fail.