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Anna Liberty reflects on four months back in Zig after Rust: projects like the smallnet library snurl, Zig Day, what she likes (anyzig, the new IO and allocator interfaces, comptime, the build system, dependency culture, error handling, incremental compilation) and what she wants improved, including stability, lifetime support, documentation and bootstrapping.
13 min · 2,942 words
The glorious @xkcdRandom Zig builtin
Adolfo Ochagavía forks the Zig compiler to add a tongue-in-cheek @xkcdRandom builtin that always returns 4, using the joke as a hands-on tour of how Zig builtins are declared, analyzed, and lowered inside the compiler.
3 min · 605 words
Kiesel Devlog #15: Release 0.4.0
Linus Groh releases Kiesel 0.4.0, his JavaScript engine written in Zig, after updating to Zig 0.17: new Kiesel.args and Kiesel.env APIs, more iterator helpers, a SerenityOS port, and inline caches for property access that give 20-30% microbenchmark speedups, with a faster parser planned for 0.5.0.
3 min · 648 words
Axel Magnuson shares techniques for abstraction in Zig, comparing comptime duck typing and interfaces with vtables against a trait pattern inspired by OCaml modules, then building trait helpers and trait functors on top of it.
18 min · 4,073 words
I made a build profiler to understand Bun's compile times
Lalit Maganti built buildprof, an open-source Linux tool that records every process spawned during a build and renders them on a shared timeline. He used it to investigate the 5x speed difference between Bun's Zig and Rust builds, tracing the bottleneck to Full LTO in the linker and a downloaded WebKit library that amplified it.
1 min · 318 wordsagent-written
A Search-and-Inference Database from Scratch in Pure Zig
Antfly recounts rewriting their Go retrieval engine in Zig while still early: first-principles design, caring about the model over embeddings, TigerBeetle-style simulation testing, and what they learned.
12 min · 2,793 words
What Zig felt like, coming from Rust
A Rust developer's first real Zig project: how the language feels for systems work—manual memory, comptime, error handling, and where it differs from Rust's ownership model and tooling.
11 min · 2,535 words
ArenaAllocators don't play nicely with ArrayLists
Karl Seguin explains why growing a Zig ArrayList backed by an ArenaAllocator can waste memory: an arena can only reclaim or resize the most recent allocation, so interleaved allocations force the list to copy into new memory and strand the old buffer, using up to about three times the memory, and he suggests pre-sizing lists and avoiding interleaved allocations.
2 min · 407 words
Everyone Should Know SIMDOriginal article link with an AI-written directory summary
Mitchell Hashimoto introduces SIMD through approachable examples in Zig. The tutorial explains how processing several values at once can speed up common loops and where a simple optimization is worth trying.
1 min · 78 wordsagent-written
Don't Trip[wire] Yourself: Testing Error Recovery in ZigOriginal article link with an AI-written directory summary
A walkthrough of testing error-recovery paths by deliberately injecting failures. Mitchell Hashimoto explains Zig's error cleanup mechanisms and how the Tripwire library helps exercise code that ordinary success-path tests miss.
1 min · 77 wordsagent-written
Tagged Union Subsets with Comptime in ZigOriginal article link with an AI-written directory summary
A real Ghostty example illustrates how Zig's compile-time facilities can generate a subset of a tagged union. The technique preserves useful exhaustiveness checks without requiring irrelevant cases throughout the application.
1 min · 77 wordsagent-written
Conditionally Disabling Code with Comptime in ZigOriginal article link with an AI-written directory summary
An introduction to conditionally excluding code with Zig's comptime features. Mitchell Hashimoto shows why compile-time selection is useful and how it can be expressed with ordinary language constructs.
1 min · 75 wordsagent-written