Best of Zig — October 2025

1. 1
   Article

   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.

   32
2. 2
   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.

   16

   1
3. 3
   Article

   Lobsters·32w

   Systems Programming with Zig

   A comprehensive guide to Zig, a modern systems programming language designed for high-performance, low-level development. Covers writing idiomatic Zig code, integrating with C and system libraries, and building systems programs like OS kernels, device drivers, and utilities. Explores networking, interpreters, and graphics implementation from scratch, positioning Zig as a productive alternative to C, C++, and Rust that emphasizes performance and safety without heavy framework dependencies.

   10

   2