You have been zigged (series) : Introduction and hello world

Source: Dev.to

Blog no. 01 So recently I watched the YouTube videos of Andrew Kelly (link-1, link-2) and became a fan of zig. I tried the ziglings exercises and loved the language, and now wants to get my hands dirty with zig. Thanks to friend and mentor Mr. Praseed Pai I have a set of simple C/C++ programs here (GNULinux.pdf) that I can rewrite in zig to learn. It covers simple but critical topics elegantly like going through environment variables, command line arguments, pipes, IPC etc and I think I’ll enjoy this. As I’m going though this, I chose to share my journey with you. Hope you will enjoy it as me. Prerequisites before reading this blog: My goal is to share some zig programs with you so that you also can get your hands dirty with zig. I will not be covering what zig is and what it is trying to achieve nor what it is trying to do different from c/rust/go. You must watch Mr. Kelly’s talks and interviews for understanding this. I strongly believe that receiving information from the source is better than receiving it through the grapevine. Ziglings Knowledge about how native programming differs from cross-platform programming using C#/Java/Python. A little bit of exposure to C, enough to understand the interop programs that are going to come. Look up what C ABI is if you don’t know what that is. (I did spell it correctly) You have zig compiler installed in your environment and is available in PATH There are three ways to do hello world in zig and let me explain. First, the program. // helloworld.zig const std = @import(“std”);

pub fn main(init: std.process.Init) !void { // debug print. this writes to standard error, not standard out std.debug.print(“Hello, World! This is written using debug.print.\n”, .{});

// writing to standard out without buffer
try std.Io.File.writeStreamingAll(.stdout(), init.io, "Hello, World! This is written using writeStreamingAll\n");

// writing to standard out with buffer (recommended approach)
// step 1: create a buffer array to hold string data.
var buffer: [1024]u8 = undefined;
// step 2: call the Writer.init method and pass in init.io.
var file_writer = std.Io.File.Writer.init(.stdout(), init.io, &buffer);
// step 3: strip type and take the interface so we have the option to
// write to anything including sockets or files and not just stdout.
var stdout_writer = &file_writer.interface;
// step 4: use the print method to print
try stdout_writer.print("Hello, World! This is written using Writer.print\n", .{});
// step 5: finally, before exiting, make sure you flush the buffer to screen
try stdout_writer.flush();

}

Lets run the program now. I’m using windows but the commands are same for all platforms. C:/learn_zig>zig run helloworld.zig

This will run the program in debug mode. Now let’s see how to build executable. C:/learn_zig>zig build-exe -O ReleaseSafe helloworld.zig