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Zig is an imperative, general-purpose, statically typed, compiled system programming language designed by Andrew Kelley. It is intended to be a successor to the C programming language, with the intention of being even smaller and simpler to program in while also offering more functionality. The improvements in language simplicity relate to flow control, function calls, library imports, variable declaration and Unicode support. Additionally, the language does not make use of macros or preprocessor instructions. Features adopted from modern languages include the addition of compile-time generic types, allowing functions to work on a variety of data, along with a small set of new compiler directives to allow access to the information about those types using reflection. Another set of additions to Zig is intended to improve code safety. Like C, Zig does not include garbage collection and memory handling is manual. To help eliminate the potential errors that arise in such systems, it includes option types and simple syntax for using them. A testing framework is also built into the language. Description Goals The primary goal of Zig is to be a better solution to the sorts of tasks that are currently solved with C. A primary concern in that respect is readability; Zig attempts to use existing concepts and syntax wherever possible, avoiding the addition of different syntax for similar concepts. Additionally, it is designed for "robustness, optimality and maintainability", including a variety of features to improve safety, optimization and testing. The small and simple syntax is an important part of the maintenance, as it is a goal of the language to allow maintainers to debug the code without having to learn the intricacies of a language they might not be familiar with. Even with these changes, Zig can compile into and against existing C code; C headers can be included in a Zig project and their functions called, and Zig code can be linked into C projects by including the compiler-built headers. In keeping with the overall design philosophy of making the code simple and easy to read, the Zig system as a whole also encompasses a number of stylistic changes compared to C and other C-like languages. For instance, the Rust language has operator overloading which means a statement like a = b + c might actually be a function call to a type's overloaded version of the plus operator. Additionally, that function might panic which might pre-empt any following code. In Zig, if something calls a function, it looks like a function call, if it doesn't, it doesn't look like a function. If it raises an error, it is explicit in the syntax, error handling is handled through error types and can be handled with catch or try. The goals of Zig are in contrast to those of many other languages designed in the same time period, like Go, Rust, Carbon, and Nim. Generally, these languages are more complex with additional features like operator overloading, functions that masquerade as values (properties), and many other features intended to aid the construction of large programs. These sorts of features have more in common with C++'s approach, and these languages are more along the lines of that language. Zig has a more conservative extension of the type system, supporting compile-time generics and accommodating a form of duck typing with the comptime directive. Memory handling One of the primary sources of bugs in C programs is the memory management system, based on malloc. malloc sets aside a block of memory for use in the code and returns a reference to that memory as a pointer. There is no system to ensure that memory is released when the program no longer needs it, which can lead to programs using up all available memory, a memory leak. More common is a dangling pointer that does not refer to a properly allocated memory object. A common solution to these problems is a garbage collector (GC), which examines the program for pointers to previously malloced memory, and removing any blocks that no longer have anything pointing to them. Although this greatly reduces, or even eliminates, memory errors, GC systems are relatively slow compared to manual memory management, and have unpredictable performance that makes them unsuited to systems programming. Another solution is automatic reference counting (ARC), which implements the same basic concept of looking for pointers to removed memory, but does so at malloc time by recording the number of pointers to that block, meaning there does not need to perform an exhaustive search, but instead adds time to every malloc and release operation. Zig aims to provide performance similar to or better than C, so GC and ARC are not suitable solutions. Instead, it uses a modern, as of 2022, concept known as option types. Instead of a pointer being allowed to point to nothing, or nil, a separate type is used to indicate data that is optionally empty. This is similar to using a structure with a pointer and a boolean that indicates whether the pointer is valid, but the state of the boolean is invisibly managed by the language and does not need to be explicitly managed by the programmer. So, for instance, when the pointer is declared it is set to "unallocated", and when that pointer receives a value from a malloc, it is set to "allocated" if the malloc succeeded. The advantage to this model is that it has very low or zero overhead; the compiler has to create the code to pass along the optional type when pointers are manipulated, as opposed to a simple pointer, but this allows it to directly express possible memory problems at compile time with no runtime support. For instance, creating a pointer with a null value and then attempting to use it is perfectly acceptable in C, leading to null-pointer errors. In contrast, a language using optional types can check that all code paths only attempt to use pointers when they are valid. While this does not eliminate all potential problems, when issues do occur at runtime the error can be more precisely located and explained. Another change for memory management in Zig is that the actual allocation is handled through structs describing the action, as opposed to calling the memory management functions in libc. For instance, in C if one wants to write a function that makes a string containing multiple copies of another string, the function might look like this: In the code, the function would examine the size of original and then malloc times that length to set aside memory for the string it will build. That malloc is invisible to the functions calling it, if they fail to later release the memory, a leak will occur. In Zig, this might be handled using a function like: In this code, the allocator variable is passed a struct that describes what code should perform the allocation, and the repeat function returns either the resulting string or, using the optional type as indicated by the !, an Allocator.Error. By directly expressing t.... Discover the Zig Software Foundation popular books. 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