Intro to the Zig Programming Language • Andrew Kelley • GOTO 2022
GOTO Conferences
50 min, 14 sec
A comprehensive summary of a presentation on the Zig programming language, its benefits, and its place in software development.
Summary
- The talk introduces the Zig programming language and explains its various features and advantages over other languages.
- It showcases the simplicity and power of Zig, focusing on ease of understanding your application, low-level control, and integration with C libraries.
- The presenter, Andrew Kelly, creator of Zig, emphasizes Zig's utility in resource-constrained environments and projects with high-performance requirements.
- The presentation demonstrates Zig's capabilities through several examples, including array lists, inline loops, multi-array lists, and hash maps.
- Andrew also covers Zig's nonprofit nature and its mission to improve the craft of software engineering industry-wide, highlighting the Zig Software Foundation's efforts.
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Polling the audience to gauge their programming experience.
- Andrew Kelly asks the audience to raise their hands based on their experience with various programming languages.
- He covers Java, Go, Python, Perl, JavaScript, Ruby, C, C++, Rust, and other systems programming languages.
Chapter 3
An exercise in debugging a piece of code written in Zig.
- Andrew engages the audience in an exercise to find a bug in a Zig code snippet that involves meta programming.
- The exercise demonstrates how to count the number of fields in a data structure and find a bug related to missing integer types.
Chapter 4
Exploring the Zig project's goals, mottos, and the benefits of the language.
- The Zig project aims to maintain robust, optimal, and reusable software, challenging basic assumptions in software development.
- Zig's motto 'Maintain it with Zig' highlights its utility in creating reproducible builds and better defaults for catching bugs in real-world applications.
- The language facilitates cross-compilation and has built-in caching for efficient builds.
Chapter 5
Real-world examples showcasing how Zig is used in various projects.
- Andrew shares examples of projects that use Zig, including a window manager, JavaScript runtime, Elixir integration, VFX plugins, and more.
- He emphasizes Zig's suitability for low-level infrastructure, libraries, high-performance applications, and resource-constrained environments.
Chapter 6
A demonstration of Zig's language features, focusing on simplicity and power.
- Andrew demonstrates Zig's straightforward syntax and features, including array lists, inline loops, multi-array lists, and hash maps.
- He shows how Zig's simplicity enables developers to focus on their application rather than esoteric language rules.
Chapter 7
How Zig seamlessly integrates with C libraries and supports cross-compilation.
- Zig's ability to integrate with C libraries is showcased through a roguelike deck builder side project example.
- The example includes native build and cross-compilation workflows, highlighting Zig's caching system and ease of use.
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