Table of Contents

1. Introduction to Zig: History, Philosophy, and Getting Started

• The origins of Zig
• Core design principles
• Comparison with other languages (C, Rust, Go)
• Setting up the Zig development environment
• Writing and running your first Zig program

2. Basic Syntax and Data Types in Zig

• Variables and constants
• Basic data types
• Comptime and runtime variables
• Arrays and slices
• Strings in Zig
• Type inference and explicit typing

3. Control Flow and Functions in Zig

• If statements and switch expressions
• For loops and while loops
• Defer and errdefer
• Function declaration and calling
• Return values and error unions
• Anonymous functions and closures

4. Memory Management and Pointers in Zig

• Stack vs heap allocation
• Using allocators in Zig
• Pointers and dereferencing
• Slices as fat pointers
• Memory safety features in Zig

5. Error Handling and Optionals in Zig

• The error type and error sets
• Returning and catching errors
• Try, catch, and switch on errors
• Optional types and null safety
• Unwrapping optionals safely

6. Structs, Enums, and Unions in Zig

• Defining and using structs
• Methods and associated functions
• Enums and switch expressions
• Tagged unions
• Anonymous structs and tuples

7. Generics and Comptime in Zig

• Generic functions and types
• Comptime function execution
• Type-level programming
• Conditional compilation
• Build-time code generation

8. Concurrency and Async Programming in Zig

• Threads in Zig
• Async functions and event loops
• Async/await syntax
• Channels and message passing
• Synchronization primitives

9. Building and Package Management with Zig

• The Zig build system
• Creating and using build.zig files
• Dependency management
• Cross-compilation with Zig
• Creating and publishing Zig packages

10. Interoperability: Using Zig with C and Other Languages

• Importing and using C libraries
• Exporting Zig functions for C
• Translating between Zig and C types
• FFI (Foreign Function Interface) best practices
• Integrating Zig with existing codebases

11. Advanced Topics: Metaprogramming and Reflection in Zig

• Comptime reflection capabilities
• Generating code at compile-time
• Introspection of types and values
• Advanced generic programming techniques
• Compile-time evaluation and optimization

12. Real-world Zig: Building a Sample Project

• Designing a non-trivial application in Zig
• Structuring a larger Zig project
• Testing and benchmarking in Zig
• Performance optimization techniques
• Deploying a Zig application