ziglings

Welcome to ziglings! This project contains a series of tiny broken programs. By fixing them, you'll learn how to read and write Zig code!

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.

Intended Audience

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:

• https://ziglearn.org/
• https://ziglang.org/documentation/master/

Getting Started

Install a master build of the Zig compiler.

Verify the installation and version of zig like so:

$ zig version
0.8.0-dev.1065+<some hexadecimal string>

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

A Note About Versions

The Zig language is under very active development. Ziglings will attempt to be current, but not bleeding-edge. However, sometimes fundamental changes will happen. Ziglings will check for a minimum version and build number (which is this one: 0.x.x-dev.<build number>) and exit if your version of Zig is too old. It is likely that you'll download a build which is greater than the number in the example shown above in this README. That's okay!

Once you have a version of the Zig compiler that works with your copy of Ziglings, they'll continue to work together forever. But if you update one, keep in mind that you may need to also update the other.

Advanced Usage

It can be handy to check just a single exercise or start from a single exercise:

zig build 19
zig build 19_start

You can also run without checking for correctness:

zig build 01_test

Or skip the build system entirely and interact directly with the compiler if you're into that sort of thing:

zig run exercises/01_hello.zig

Calling all wizards: To prepare an executable for debugging, install it to zig-cache/bin with:

zig build 01_install

TODO

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

Planned exercises:

• 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
• Slices
• Multi pointers
• Unions
• Numeric types (integers, floats)
• Labelled blocks and loops
• Loops as expressions
• Comptime
• Inline loops (how to DEMO this?)
• Anonymous structs
• Sentinel termination
• Vectors
• Imports
• Allocators
• Arraylist
• Filesystem
• Readers and Writers
• Formatting
• JSON
• Random Numbers
• Crypto
• Threads
• Hash Maps
• Stacks
• Sorting
• Iterators
• Formatting specifiers
• Advanced Formatting
• Suspend / Resume
• Async / Await
• Nosuspend
• Async Frames, Suspend Blocks

The initial topics for these exercises were unabashedly cribbed from ziglearn.org. I've since moved things around in an order that I think best lets each topic build upon each other.