3.8 KiB
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:
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 Compiler 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.
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
- 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.