Best of Zig — 2025

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Article
omg! ubuntu!·20w
Ghostty Terminal Adopts a Non-Profit Funding Model
Ghostty, a fast GPU-accelerated terminal emulator, now operates under fiscal sponsorship with Hack Club, a 501(c)(3) non-profit. Creator Mitchell Hashimoto believes critical infrastructure should be stewarded by mission-driven entities prioritizing public benefit. The structure enables transparent donation management while Hashimoto remains project lead with full decision authority. Nothing changes technically—Ghostty stays open source (MIT license) with the same roadmap. The move protects against future commercialization and ensures the project can outlive its creator.
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Article
The Register·24w
Zig quits GitHub, gripes about Microsoft's AI obsession
The Zig Software Foundation is migrating from GitHub to Codeberg, citing declining engineering quality and neglected critical bugs in GitHub Actions. A CPU-spinning bug in GitHub's safe_sleep script went unaddressed for years despite being reported multiple times, causing CI runners to hang indefinitely. Zig's president criticized Microsoft's AI focus as distracting from core platform maintenance, pointing to what he calls 'vibe-scheduling' where jobs run seemingly at random. The move reflects broader developer concerns about GitHub's priorities, with Codeberg doubling its membership since January as other projects also consider leaving.
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Article
Community Picks·1y
lightpanda-io/browser: The open-source browser made for headless usage
Lightpanda is an open-source headless browser designed for efficient web automation, AI agents, LLM training, scraping, and testing. It features a significantly lower memory footprint and faster execution times compared to Chrome. The browser supports Javascript execution and web APIs, is compatible with tools like Playwright and Puppeteer, and is built using the Zig programming language. Installation and configuration instructions are provided for both Linux and MacOS.
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Article
Hacker News·23w
Why We Built Lightpanda in Zig - Blog
Lightpanda chose Zig over C++ and Rust to build their browser engine, prioritizing simplicity and explicit control. The team values Zig's straightforward syntax, compile-time metaprogramming, explicit allocator model for fine-grained memory management, and seamless C interoperability for integrating with V8. While Zig is pre-1.0 with a smaller ecosystem, its arena allocators enable efficient per-page memory handling, comptime features reduce boilerplate when bridging JavaScript, and fast compilation times maintain developer productivity. The decision reflects a pragmatic choice for a small team building performance-critical infrastructure without the complexity of C++ templates or Rust's borrow checker.
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Article
InfoWorld·1y
What you need to know about Go, Rust, and Zig
Go, Rust, and Zig are emerging programming languages each with distinct advantages. Go, known for its simplicity and minimal syntax, excels in network services and standalone applications. Rust prioritizes memory safety and speed, becoming popular in server-side apps and replacing C/C++ in certain scenarios. Zig, a modern alternative to C, focuses on low-level programming with better memory safety features and easier integration with C projects.
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Community Picks·1y
Rust vs. Zig: The New Programming Language Battle for Performance
Rust is a popular programming language known for its memory safety, performance, and strong concurrency model, used extensively in large applications like browsers, operating systems, and embedded systems. Zig, emerging as a competitor, offers simplicity, manual memory management, and high performance without the complexity of Rust's borrow checker. Both languages cater to different needs: Rust for safety and an extensive ecosystem, and Zig for manual control and ease of learning for system-level programming.
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Article
Zig·1y
Lightpanda Browser, another incredible project written in Zig
Lightpanda Browser is an ultra-low memory footprint web browser that boasts fast execution and almost instantaneous startup times, built entirely from scratch using Zig.
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Article
ITNEXT·1y
Comparing error handling in Zig and Go
Explores the error handling mechanisms of Zig and Go, highlighting their treatment of errors as values. Zig uses specialized enums with concise syntax involving 'try' and 'catch', while Go leverages interfaces for rich contextual error descriptions. The piece discusses the benefits and drawbacks of each approach, noting Zig's concise feature set versus Go's simplicity and verbosity.
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Video
bigboxSWE·32w
Make coding so fun discipline feels useless
Programming burnout can be overcome by dedicating time to "vibe coding" - coding purely for personal enjoyment without specific goals or outcomes. Setting aside regular time to explore interesting technologies, languages, or projects that spark curiosity can reignite passion for programming. This playful approach to coding helps maintain energy and enthusiasm that carries over into professional work, making discipline less necessary when intrinsic motivation is strong.
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ThePrimeTime·1y
Picking A Language In 2025
Choosing a programming language post-2025 is challenging due to the rapidly evolving landscape. The author, who has previously worked with Rust and Go, is exploring alternatives like Zig, Odin, and JAI. There's a strong emphasis on languages that support metaprogramming. The discussion also highlights the frustrations with some languages' complexity and the uncertainty of adopting new ones during a period of fast-paced developments.
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Article
The Register·1y
Ghostty 1: A better terminal emulator
Ghostty, a terminal emulator developed by HashiCorp co-founder Mitchell Hashimoto, has reached version 1.0.1. It is cross-platform, available for macOS and Linux, and is implemented in the Zig programming language. Ghostty offers several notable improvements, including GPU acceleration, efficient processor usage, and support for multiple writing systems and font rendering. Despite its new features, Ghostty has some compatibility issues with traditional desktop environments.
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Article
Zed·47w
Agentic Engineering in Action — Zed's Blog
Mitchell Hashimoto demonstrates his approach to AI-assisted development while building Ghostty terminal emulator. He treats AI tools like junior engineers, providing clear architectural guidance and well-scoped problems rather than open-ended tasks. His workflow involves maintaining architectural control, working in parallel with AI agents for tasks like refactoring and cleanup, and using multiple AI models competitively. While AI excels at refactoring and simple bug fixes, it struggles with architectural decisions, high-performance data structures, and languages like Zig.
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Video
ThePrimeTime·1y
I Will Not Write Rust Again
The author expresses a personal decision to stop using Rust for future projects despite appreciating some of its features like enums and serialization. They highlight a preference for Go and exhibit an interest in exploring the Zig language, pointing out its advantages in metaprogramming and performance. The author reflects on their previous positive experiences with C and seeks a similar enjoyment in newer languages, finding Rust less appealing compared to other options.
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Hacker News·26w
Zigbook – Learn the Zig Programming Language
Zigbook is an open-source, comprehensive guide to learning Zig programming language. It features 61 chapters with project-based learning and real-world examples, emphasizing not just syntax but a fundamental shift in thinking about software development.
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Hacker News·32w
Why TigerBeetle is the most interesting database in the world
TigerBeetle is a financial transactions database built from scratch with modern distributed systems principles. It uses debits and credits as first-class primitives instead of SQL, achieving massive performance gains by packing 8,190 transactions into a single query. The database is written in Zig, distributed by default with Viewstamped Replication consensus, and handles storage faults through Protocol-Aware Recovery. TigerBeetle's development leveraged Deterministic Simulation Testing (DST) via their VOPR cluster running on 1,000 CPU cores, enabling them to build a Jepsen-validated system in just 3.5 years. Their engineering methodology, called TigerStyle, emphasizes assertions, static memory allocation, zero dependencies, and thinking deeply about performance during the design phase.
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Community Picks·1y
I spent 181 minutes waiting for the Zig compiler this week
The Zig compiler takes approximately 1 minute and 30 seconds to compile debug builds, causing prolonged waiting times for developers working on large codebases like Bun. The language server, zls, lacks critical features like type-checking, further slowing development. While incremental compilation is in progress, it is not fully ready, causing additional delays in the development process.
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Article
Lobsters·1y
How I think about Zig and Rust
Zig and Rust are both systems programming languages but have different core philosophies. Zig emphasizes simplicity and minimalism, lacking features like closures and operator overloading, which makes it suitable for low-level programming. Rust, on the other hand, comes from a high-level background, offering more expressiveness and safety features like traits and pattern matching. While Zig is ideal for direct memory and system-level operations with seamless C interoperability, Rust provides a more user-friendly experience with extensive tooling and a strong type system.
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YouTube·26w
Why Zig over Rust, C, C++, Odin, Nim, etc?
A developer explains their decision to focus on Zig over alternatives like Rust, C++, C, Nim, and others. Key reasons include Zig's explicitness with no hidden behavior, compile-time metaprogramming that's simpler than macros or templates, seamless C interop, unified tooling (compiler, formatter, package manager), and manual but structured memory management. While acknowledging Rust's safety guarantees and C++'s maturity, they prefer Zig's straightforward approach, errors-as-values pattern, and opt-in safety features across different build modes. The choice is presented as personal preference based on individual values rather than objective superiority.
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YouTube·23w
Zig got better and I almost missed it
Zig 0.15 brings major improvements including a self-hosted x86 backend (up to 5× faster debug builds), 50% speedup from threaded codegen, and removal of async/await keywords. The standard library underwent significant changes with non-generic Reader/Writer interfaces ("Writergate"), unmanaged ArrayList as default, and HTTP client/server reworks. Language changes include switch support for non-exhaustive enums, usingnamespace removal, and stricter int-to-float casting. The build system adds a web UI and improved templates. Future plans include AArch64 backend, incremental compilation, and a new I/O interface for colorless async.
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Article
omg! ubuntu!·1y
Ghostty Update Adds Server-Side Decoration Support on Linux
Ghostty 1.1.0 has been released, bringing improvements and fixes. Notable updates include support for server-side decorations on Wayland, a traditional app menu bar, new keybinding features, enhanced alpha blending for macOS, and improved IME support for macOS and Linux. The release also introduces various configuration options, bug fixes, and enhancements for a more integrated and efficient user experience.
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Article
Collections·23w
Zig's Innovative Approach to Asynchronous Programming
Zig introduces a new generic Io interface that unifies synchronous and asynchronous I/O operations without requiring changes to function signatures. The design includes Io.Threaded for synchronous operations with optional threading and Io.Evented for asynchronous I/O using io_uring or kqueue. This approach solves the function coloring problem by treating asynchronicity as a performance optimization rather than a syntactic requirement, allowing library authors to write code that works seamlessly in both execution contexts.
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Article
matklad·24w
Size Matters
Explores principles for determining optimal code organization size, arguing that the ratio of module size to interface matters more than absolute size. Introduces the concept of minimizing the "cut" by keeping related code together while separating independent concerns, and discusses how physical constraints like screen dimensions can guide better design decisions. Uses examples from TigerBeetle's codebase to illustrate when files should be split or kept together based on cohesion rather than arbitrary line limits.
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YouTube·48w
Zig is better than Rust (sometimes)
A detailed comparison highlighting specific areas where Zig excels over Rust, including optional handling with the `orelse` keyword, undefined behavior management, simpler module systems, streamlined variable declarations, safer pointer handling with alignment tracking, powerful `comptime` features for compile-time code generation, seamless C interoperability, and better allocator systems. The author emphasizes that both languages are powerful but Zig offers more ergonomic solutions in certain scenarios.
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Article
Mitchell Hashimoto·32w
Zig Builds Are Getting Faster
Zig 0.15.1 delivers significant compilation speed improvements across all build scenarios. Real-world benchmarks from the Ghostty terminal emulator project show build script compilation dropping from 7 seconds to 1.7 seconds, full uncached builds improving from 41 to 32 seconds, and incremental builds getting 15-66% faster. These gains come despite most code still using LLVM rather than Zig's self-hosted backend. The improvements stem from years of work on custom code generation backends, linkers, and incremental compilation infrastructure, with even greater speedups expected as these features mature.
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Community Picks·1y
rewrite.md
Rewriting a compiler from scratch in a different language can offer significant benefits, such as starting fresh with accumulated knowledge, discarding old mistakes, and making use of new language features. This post discusses Roc's planned rewrite from Rust to Zig, detailing why Zig's fast compile times, better tooling, and specific language features make it the preferred choice. The post also outlines the various rewrites planned for different parts of the compiler and emphasizes the importance of compile times in enhancing developer productivity.
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