ziglings

Welcome to ziglings! This project contains a series of incomplete exercises. By completing the exercises, you learn how to read and write Zig code.

This project was directly inspired by the brilliant and fun rustlings project for the Rust language.

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

Note: This currently uses a shell (Bash) script to automate the "game". A future update may remove this requirement. See TODO below.

Install the master release of the Zig compiler.

Verify the installation and version of zig like so:

$ zig version
0.7.1+<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

Manual Usage

If you want to run a single file for testing, you can do so with this command:

zig run exercises/01_hello.zig

or, alternatively

zig build 01_test

To verify a single file, use

zig build 01_only

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
• Multi pointers
• Slices
• Unions
• Numeric types (integers, floats)
• Labelled blocks and loops
• Loops as expressions
• Optionals
• 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.