Playing with Zig on Windows

This repository gathers Zig code examples coming from various websites and books. It also includes several build scripts (batch files, Make scripts) for experimenting with Zig on a Windows machine.

Ada, Akka, C++, COBOL, Dart, Deno, Docker, Flix, Golang, GraalVM, Haskell, Kafka, Kotlin, LLVM, Modula-2, Node.js, Rust, Scala 3, Spark, Spring, TruffleSqueak and WiX Toolset are other topics we are continuously monitoring.

Project dependencies

This project depends on two external software for the Microsoft Windows platform:

• Git 2.46 (release notes)
• Zig 0.13 (release notes)

Optionally one may also install the following software:

• ConEmu 2023 (release notes)
• SDL 2 (release notes)
• Visual Studio Code 1.92 (release notes)
• Zig 0.14 DEV

🔎 Git for Windows provides a BASH emulation used to run git from the command line (as well as over 250 Unix commands like awk, diff, file, grep, more, mv, rmdir, sed and wc).

For instance our development environment looks as follows (August 2024) ¹:

C:\opt\ConEmu\           ( 26 MB)
C:\opt\Git\              (367 MB)
C:\opt\SDL2\             (  9 MB)
C:\opt\zig-0.13.0\       (293 MB)
C:\opt\zig-0.14.0-dev\   (269 MB)
C:\opt\VSCode\           (341 MB)

☛ Installation policy
When possible we install software from a Zip archive rather than via a Windows installer. In our case we defined C:\opt\ as the installation directory for optional software tools (similar to the /opt/ directory on Unix).

Directory structure ▴

This project is organized as follows:

docs\
examples\{README.md, hello}
README.md
RESOURCES.md
setenv.bat

where

• directory docs\ contains Zig related papers/articles.
• directory examples\ contains Zig code examples (see README.md).
• file README.md is the Markdown document for this page.
• file RESOURCES.md is the Markdown document presenting external resources.
• file setenv.bat is the batch script for setting up our environment.

We also define a virtual drive – e.g. drive H: – in our working environment in order to reduce/hide the real path of our project directory (see article "Windows command prompt limitation" from Microsoft Support).

🔎 We use the Windows external command subst to create virtual drives; for instance:

> subst H: %USERPROFILE%\workspace\zig-examples

In the next section we give a brief description of the batch files present in this project.

Batch commands ▴

setenv.bat

We execute command setenv.bat once to setup our development environment:

> setenv
Tool versions:
   zig 0.13.0, make 3.81, SDL2 2.30.6.0,
   git 2.46.0, diff 3.10, bash 5.2.26(1)

Usage examples ▴

setenv.bat

Command setenv.bat with option -verbose displays additional information:

• the tool paths (which may not contain the version suffix, i.e. C:\opt\Git\bin\git.exe in some installations),
• the environment variables defined locally within this session,
• and the path associations (i.e. H:\ in this case, but other drive names may be displayed as path associations are globally defined).

> setenv -verbose
Tool versions:
   zig 0.13.0, make 3.81, SDL2 2.30.6.0,
   git 2.46.0, diff 3.10, bash 5.2.26(1)
Tool paths:
   C:\opt\zig-0.13.0\zig.exe
   C:\opt\make-3.81\bin\make.exe
   C:\opt\Git\bin\git.exe
   C:\opt\Git\usr\bin\diff.exe
   C:\opt\Git\bin\bash.exe
Environment variables:
   "GIT_HOME=C:\opt\Git"
   "MAKE_HOME=C:\opt\make-3.81"
   "MSYS_HOME=C:\opt\msys64"
   "SDL2_HOME=C:\opt\sdl2"
   "ZIG_HOME=C:\opt\zig-0.13.0"
Path associations:
   H:\: => %USERPROFILE%\workspace-perso\zig-examples

Footnotes ▴

[1] Downloads ↩

In our case we downloaded the following installation files (see section 1):

ConEmuPack.230724.7z              (  5 MB)
PortableGit-2.46.0-64-bit.7z.exe  ( 41 MB)
SDL2-devel-2.30.6-VC.zip          (  8 MB)
VSCode-win32-x64-1.92.1.zip       (131 MB)
zig-windows-x86_64-0.13.0.zip     ( 75 MB)

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mics/August 2024 ▲