2d9c4792ae
Currently, std.fmt has a misguided, half-assed Unicode implementation with an ambiguous definition of the word "character". This commit does almost nothing to mitigate the problem, but it lets me close an open PR. In the future I will revert 473cb1fd74d6d478bb3d5fda4707ce3f6e6e5bf6 as well as 279607cae58f7be46335793df6a4a753d0a800aa, and redo the whole std.fmt API, breaking everyone's code and unfortunately causing nearly every Zig user to have a bad day. std.fmt will go back to only dealing in bytes, with zero Unicode awareness whatsoever. I suggest a third party package provide Unicode functionality as well as a more advanced text formatting function for when Unicode awareness is needed. I have always suggested this, and I sincerely apologize for merging pull requests that compromised my stance on this matter. Most applications should, instead, strive to make their code independent of Unicode, dealing strictly in encoded UTF-8 bytes, and never attempt operations such as: substring manipulation, capitalization, alignment, word replacement, or column number calculations. Exceptions to this include web browsers, GUI toolkits, and terminals. If you're not making one of these, any dependency on Unicode is probably a bug or worse, a poor design decision. closes #18536
A general-purpose programming language and toolchain for maintaining robust, optimal, and reusable software.
Documentation
If you are looking at this README file in a source tree, please refer to the Release Notes, Language Reference, or Standard Library Documentation corresponding to the version of Zig that you are using by following the appropriate link on the download page.
Otherwise, you're looking at a release of Zig, and you can find documentation here:
- doc/langref.html
- doc/std/index.html
Installation
A Zig installation is composed of two things:
- The Zig executable
- The lib/ directory
At runtime, the executable searches up the file system for the lib/ directory, relative to itself:
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- ../lib/
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- (and so on)
In other words, you can unpack a release of Zig anywhere, and then begin
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mechanism supports that use case too (i.e. /usr/bin/zig and /usr/lib/zig/).
Building from Source
Ensure you have the required dependencies:
- CMake >= 3.5
- System C/C++ Toolchain
- LLVM, Clang, LLD development libraries == 17.x
Then it is the standard CMake build process:
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make install
For more options, tips, and troubleshooting, please see the Building Zig From Source page on the wiki.
Building from Source without LLVM
In this case, the only system dependency is a C compiler.
cc -o bootstrap bootstrap.c
./bootstrap
This produces a zig2 executable in the current working directory. This is a
"stage2" build of the compiler,
without LLVM extensions, and is
therefore lacking these features:
- Release mode optimizations
- aarch64 machine code backend
@cImport/zig translate-c- Ability to compile C files
- Ability to compile assembly files
- Some ELF linking features
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However, a compiler built this way does provide a C backend, which may be useful for creating system packages of Zig projects using the system C toolchain. In such case, LLVM is not needed!
Contributing
Zig is Free and Open Source Software. We welcome bug reports and patches from everyone. However, keep in mind that Zig governance is BDFN (Benevolent Dictator For Now) which means that Andrew Kelley has final say on the design and implementation of everything.
One of the best ways you can contribute to Zig is to start using it for an open-source personal project.
This leads to discovering bugs and helps flesh out use cases, which lead to further design iterations of Zig. Importantly, each issue found this way comes with real world motivations, making it straightforward to explain the reasoning behind proposals and feature requests.
You will be taken much more seriously on the issue tracker if you have a personal project that uses Zig.
The issue label Contributor Friendly exists to help you find issues that are limited in scope and/or knowledge of Zig internals.
Please note that issues labeled Proposal but do not also have the Accepted label are still under consideration, and efforts to implement such a proposal have a high risk of being wasted. If you are interested in a proposal which is still under consideration, please express your interest in the issue tracker, providing extra insights and considerations that others have not yet expressed. The most highly regarded argument in such a discussion is a real world use case.
For more tips, please see the Contributing page on the wiki.
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Please see the Community wiki page for a public listing of social spaces.