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Comment by cturtle | Hacker News Reader

I’m using Zig a lot right now, and I have been pleasantly surprised by the standard library. Maybe it’s due to Zig being a very straightforward language, but I find most everything I read in the standard library to make immediate sense.

I don’t know about reading std alone to learn Zig though, I used other sources like ziglings and ziglearn which taught me syntax and patterns. Had I started with the standard library I doubt I would have picked up the language as quickly as I have.

So having learned Zig I am much more inclined to look at standard libraries for languages I learn in the future, but I don’t think it’s wise to rely only on standard libraries for learning.

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Learning Zig by reading its standard library source has worked for me. The source files also include quite self explanatory tests that compensate for incomplete documentation on main Zig website.

Is there any learning resource for Zig that doesn’t assume you already know C? I couldn’t find any.

I'll be honest there aren't really any complete learning resources even for those that do know C. For what there is the language is changing whatever you read in documentation might not be true between stable and master at the moment. The stdlib source is probably the best reference but even reading strictly from that it doesn't mean you'll learn to make code that works it means you'll learn to make code that's correct. There are plenty of known compiler and language issues on GitHub and the self hosted compiler is still being written.

At the moment since Zig isn't complete you aren't going to find documentation that is either. Particularly for newcomers.

Ziglings [0] is a series of small problems where you solve bugs in Zig code, and I enjoyed working through them. The readme claims "you are not expected to have any prior experience with... C." When I did ziglings I found the most difficult part was adjusting to the type syntax (which I now love).

I admittedly know C very well, but assuming you already know a language with a C-like syntax (C++, Java, JavaScript, C#, Rust, etc.) most things like functions, control flow, variables, statements map to Zig with only small syntactic differences.

One thing that may be difficult to learn not knowing C is working with strings, since they are just arrays of bytes. Most other languages have a string type, but Zig is much more like C in that strings are null-terminated fixed-sized arrays of bytes.

[0] https://github.com/ratfactor/ziglings

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