Zig (programming language)

Zig is a system programming language designed to be a general-purpose improvement to the C programming language. It is free and open-source software, released under an MIT License on Codeberg, a source-code sharing platform. Differences with C relate to control flow, function calls, library imports, variable declaration and Unicode support. The language makes no use of macros or preprocessor instructions. Features adopted from modern languages include the addition of compile time generic data types, allowing functions to work on a variety of data, along with a small set of new compiler directives to allow access to the information about those types using reflection. Zig requires manual memory management. Features for low-level programming include packed structs, arbitrary-width integers and multiple pointer types. Zig was designed by Andrew Kelley and first announced in 2016. Development is funded by the Zig Software Foundation (ZSF) which receives corporate sponsorships as well as personal donations.