Ziglings

Welcome to Ziglings! This project contains a series of tiny broken programs (and one nasty surprise). By fixing them, you'll learn how to read and write Zig code.

Ziglings

Those broken programs need your help! (You'll also save the planet from evil aliens and help some friendly elephants stick together, which is very sweet of you.)

This project was initiated by Dave Gauer and is directly inspired by the brilliant and fun rustlings project. 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 details:

• https://ziglang.org/learn/
• https://ziglang.org/documentation/master/
• Zig in Depth! (video series)

Also, the Zig community is incredibly friendly and helpful!

Getting Started

Install a development build of the Zig compiler. (See the "master" section of the downloads page.) Sometimes the latest build is not available there; in that case, you can download it directly from the build directory.

Verify the installation and build number of zig like so:

$ zig version
0.16.0-dev.xxxx+xxxxxxxxx

Clone this repository with Git:

git clone https://codeberg.org/ziglings/exercises.git ziglings
cd ziglings

Then run zig build and follow the instructions to begin!

zig build

Note: The output of Ziglings is the unaltered output from the Zig compiler. Part of the purpose of Ziglings is to acclimate you to reading these.

A Note About Versions

Hint: To check out Ziglings for a stable release of Zig, you can use the appropriate tag.

The Zig language is under very active development. In order to be current, Ziglings tracks development builds of the Zig compiler rather than versioned release builds. The last stable release was 0.15.2, but Ziglings needs a dev build with pre-release version "0.16.0" and a build number at least as high as that shown in the example version check above.

It is likely that you'll download a build which is greater than the minimum.

Once you have a build of the Zig compiler that works with Ziglings, they'll continue to work together. But keep in mind that if you update one, you may need to also update the other.

Version Changes

• 2026年01月09日 zig 0.16.0-dev.2075 - move randomness API to std.Io, see #30709
• 2026年01月07日 zig 0.16.0-dev.2040 - adjust temp files, see #30683
• 2026年01月06日 zig 0.16.0-dev.1976 - move process API to std.Io and changes to main/environ/argv, see #30644
• 2025年12月28日 zig 0.16.0-dev.1859 - file system I/O integrated with the std.Io interface, see #30232
• 2025年11月01日 zig 0.16.0-dev.1204 - more changes due to new I/O API, see #25592
• 2025年09月24日 zig 0.16.0-dev.377 - Enable passing file content as args, see #25228
• 2025年09月03日 zig 0.16.0-dev.164 - changes in reader, see #25077
• 2025年08月15日 zig 0.15.0-dev.1519 - changes in array list, see #24801
• 2025年08月08日 zig 0.15.0-dev.1380 - changes in build system, see #24588
• 2025年07月22日 zig 0.15.0-dev.1092 - various changes due to new I/O API, see #24488
• 2024年09月16日 zig 0.14.0-dev.1573 - introduction of labeled switch, see #21257
• 2024年09月02日 zig 0.14.0-dev.1409 - several changes in std.builtin, see #21225
• 2024年08月04日 zig 0.14.0-dev.1224 - several changes in build system, see #21115
• 2024年08月04日 zig 0.14.0-dev.839 - several changes in build system, see #20580, #20600
• 2024年06月17日 zig 0.14.0-dev.42 - changes in std.mem.split and tokenize - see #15579
• 2024年05月29日 zig 0.13.0-dev.339 - rework std.Progress - see #20059
• 2024年03月21日 zig 0.12.0-dev.3518 - change to @fieldParentPtr - see #19470
• 2024年03月21日 zig 0.12.0-dev.3397 - rename std.os to std.posix - see #5019
• 2024年03月14日 zig 0.12.0-dev.3302 - changes in std.fmt - floating-point formatting implementation - see #19229
• 2024年02月05日 zig 0.12.0-dev.2618 - changes in build system - from Step.zig_exe to Step.graph.zig_exe - see #18778
• 2024年01月05日 zig 0.12.0-dev.2043 - rename of std.Build.FileSource to std.Build.LazyPath - see #16353
• 2023年10月24日 zig 0.12.0-dev.1243 - changes in std.ChildProcess: renamed exec to run - see #5853
• 2023年06月26日 zig 0.11.0-dev.4246 - changes in compile step (now it can be null)
• 2023年06月26日 zig 0.11.0-dev.3853 - removal of destination type from all cast builtins
• 2023年06月20日 zig 0.11.0-dev.3747 - @enumToInt is now @intFromEnum and @intToFloat is now @floatFromInt
• 2023年05月25日 zig 0.11.0-dev.3295 - std.debug.TTY is now std.io.tty
• 2023年04月30日 zig 0.11.0-dev.2704 - use of the new std.Build.ExecutableOptions.link_libc field
• 2023年04月12日 zig 0.11.0-dev.2560 - changes in std.Build - remove run() and install()
• 2023年04月07日 zig 0.11.0-dev.2401 - fixes of the new build system - see #212
• 2023年02月21日 zig 0.11.0-dev.2157 - changes in build system - new: parallel processing of the build steps
• 2023年02月21日 zig 0.11.0-dev.1711 - changes in for loops - new: Multi-Object For-Loops + Struct-of-Arrays
• 2023年02月12日 zig 0.11.0-dev.1638 - changes in std.Build cache_root now returns a directory struct
• 2023年02月04日 zig 0.11.0-dev.1568 - changes in std.Build (combine std.build and std.build.Builder into std.Build)
• 2023年01月14日 zig 0.11.0-dev.1302 - changes in @addWithOverflow (now returns a tuple) and @typeInfo; temporary disabled async functionality
• 2022年09月09日 zig 0.10.0-dev.3978 - change in NativeTargetInfo.detect in build
• 2022年09月06日 zig 0.10.0-dev.3880 - Ex 074 correctly fails again: comptime array len
• 2022年08月29日 zig 0.10.0-dev.3685 - @typeName() output change, stage1 req. for async
• 2022年07月31日 zig 0.10.0-dev.3385 - std lib string fmt() option changes
• 2022年03月19日 zig 0.10.0-dev.1427 - method for getting sentinel of type changed
• 2021年12月20日 zig 0.9.0-dev.2025 - c_void is now anyopaque
• 2021年06月14日 zig 0.9.0-dev.137 - std.build.Id .Custom is now .custom
• 2021年04月21日 zig 0.8.0-dev.1983 - std.fmt.format() any format string required
• 2021年02月12日 zig 0.8.0-dev.1065 - std.fmt.format() s (string) format string required

Advanced Usage

It can be handy to check just a single exercise:

zig build -Dn=19

Or run all exercises, starting from a specific one:

zig build -Ds=27

Or let Ziglings pick an exercise for you:

zig build -Drandom

You can also run without checking for correctness:

zig build -Dn=19 test

Or skip the build system entirely and interact directly with the compiler if you're into that sort of thing:

zig run exercises/001_hello.zig

Calling all wizards: To prepare an executable for debugging, install it to zig-cache/bin with:

zig build -Dn=19 install

To get a list of all possible options, run:

zig build -Dn=19 -l
 install Install 019_functions2.zig to prefix path
 uninstall Uninstall 019_functions2.zig from prefix path
 test Run 019_functions2.zig without checking output
 ...

To reset the progress (have it run all the exercises that have already been completed):

zig build -Dreset

What's Covered

The primary goal for Ziglings is to cover the core Zig language.

It would be nice to cover the Standard Library as well, but this is currently challenging because the stdlib is evolving even faster than the core language (and that's saying something!). Not only would stdlib coverage change very rapidly, some exercises might even cease to be relevant entirely.

Having said that, there are some stdlib features that are probably here to stay or are so important to understand that they are worth the extra effort to keep current.

Conspicuously absent from Ziglings are a lot of string manipulation exercises. This is because Zig itself largely avoids dealing with strings. Hopefully there will be an obvious way to address this in the future. The Ziglings crew loves strings!

Zig Core Language

• 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
• Struct methods
• Slices
• Many-item pointers
• Unions
• Numeric types (integers, floats)
• Labelled blocks and loops
• Loops as expressions
• Builtins
• Inline loops
• Comptime
• Sentinel termination
• Quoted identifiers @""
• Anonymous structs/tuples/lists
• Async I/O
• Interfaces
• Bit manipulation
• Working with C
• Opaque types (anyopaque)
• Threading
• Labeled switch
• Vector operations (SIMD)

Zig Standard Library

• String formatting
• Testing
• Tokenization
• File handling

Contributing

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

Please see CONTRIBUTING in this repo for the full details.