From Go to Zig

My friend Christine has spoken well of Zig for a while now, and my interest was piqued when I read that it can integrate with C libraries without the use of FFI/bindings. In this article I will try to contrast Zig against my favorite language, Go.

(I will leave it to others to compare Zig with C++, D or Rust)

Similarities with Go…

Let’s start off by listing some of the characteristics shared between Go and Zig:

Ahead-of-time (AOT) compiled
Open Source
Statically typed
Cross-compilation
No operator overloading
Tool for one canonical code formatting style (go fmt and zig fmt)
Errors are values
WebAssembly as a compile target
Multiline string literals
defer
Source code is encoded in UTF-8

How is it different from Go?

Note: These are just a few of the things I’ve picked up when reading about Zig. I still have a lot to learn before I feel confident in using the language.

Build modes on scope level
Zig Build System
Manual memory management
Algebraic data types (Union and Enum types!)
Optional type instead of null pointers
Can output tiny binaries
Generics and compile-time code execution
First-class support for no standard library
Somewhat easier to Google
~zero overhead when calling out to C
“Zig is better at using C libraries than C is at using C libraries.”
Enforcing the handling of returned errors
Arbitrary bit-width integers (i7 for example)
Undefined values
Thread local variables
No multiline comments

The Zen of Zig

Communicate intent precisely.
Edge cases matter.
Favor reading code over writing code.
Only one obvious way to do things.
Runtime crashes are better than bugs.
Compile errors are better than runtime crashes.
Incremental improvements.
Avoid local maximums.
Reduce the amount one must remember.
Minimize energy spent on coding style.
Resource deallocation must succeed.
Together we serve end users.

Installing Zig

If you are using macOS and have Homebrew installed, then you can install Zig like this:

$ brew install zig

The current version of zig as of this writing is 0.13.0.

Make sure you also get zig.vim.

Hello, World!

The entry point of a Zig binary is the main fn. The binary is named after the .zig file.

zighello/zighello.zig

const std = @import("std");

pub fn main() !void {
    const stdout = std.io.getStdOut().writer();
    try stdout.print("Hello, {s}!\n", .{"world"});
}

This can be compiled with zig build-exe zighello.zig -O ReleaseSmall -fstrip -fsingle-threaded and results in a ~10 KB static executable.

(Not strictly true that you get a static executable under macOS, it is linked to libSystem.B.dylib)

And as you probably know, the Go entry point is the main func.

gohello/main.go

package main

import "fmt"

func main() {
	fmt.Println("Hello, World!")
}

This can be compiled with go build -ldflags "-s -w" -trimpath main.go and results in a ~1.6 MB executable (when using Go version 1.15 under macOS)

Note: The size of your binaries doesn’t matter in most cases, but sometimes it matters a lot, for example when compiling to WebAssembly

Learn more about Zig

Bonus: Linking to the shared library from the article Go and Ruby-FFI

An example of importing a shared library from Zig, using the @cInclude feature:

const std = @import("std");

const c = @cImport({
    @cInclude("libsum.h");
});

pub fn main() void {
    const sum: i64 = c.add(4, 2);

    std.debug.warn("{}\n", .{sum});
}

Then you can compile this by calling zig -isystem . --library ./libsum.so build-exe zigsum.zig

Captain: Take off every ‘ZIG’!!

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