Day 1: Getting Started with Zig

Today marks my first day exploring Zig, a modern systems programming language.

I like to learn languages by doing to get a better sense of how things work. Along the way, we will also dive into the fundamentals of Zig and explore its features. So, we will start by building a simple "Hello, World!" program in Zig.

Installation

To get started with Zig, we need to install Zig on our system. I am using zvm to manage Zig versions. You can install zvm using the following command:

curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tristanisham/zvm/master/install.sh | bash

Hello World in Zig

Let's start with the classic "Hello, World!" program in Zig:

Create a folder for our project "hello-zig":

mkdir hello-zig
cd hello-zig

Now, let initialize a Zig project:

zig init

Your project structure should look like this:

  src
     main.zig
     root.zig
 build.zig
 build.zig.zon

Now, let's update main.zig with the following code:

const std = @import("std");

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