We have Traits at Home

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.

Tutorial · Zig · Programming Languages · Programming

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.

Tutorial · Programming Languages · Zig · Memory Management

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.

Tutorial · SIMD · Zig

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.

Tutorial · Zig · Software Testing

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.

Tutorial · Zig · Type Systems

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.

Tutorial · Zig · Build Systems