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  • Book Overview & Buying Systems Programming with Zig
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Systems Programming with Zig

Systems Programming with Zig

By : Mihalis Tsoukalos
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Systems Programming with Zig

Systems Programming with Zig

By: Mihalis Tsoukalos

Overview of this book

Build reliable systems software with Zig through a project-driven approach focused on practical engineering challenges. Guided by UNIX systems engineer & bestselling author Mihalis Tsoukalos, you will learn modern systems programming techniques while creating production-ready applications, UNIX tools, & network services. This book takes you from essential UNIX tooling and build infrastructure to advanced topics such as direct memory access, binary formats, filesystem monitoring, networking, concurrency, asynchronous I/O, & database integration. Through hands-on projects, you will create command-line utilities, TCP and UDP services, HTTP applications, file indexing tools, cache servers, & a domain-specific language interpreter that combines memory management, comptime metaprogramming, parsing, evaluation, & error handling. Each chapter demonstrates how Zig features solve practical systems programming problems. You will work with memory management, process control, synchronization primitives, event-driven architectures, SQLite integration, protocol design, & performance-focused data structures while learning the reasoning behind key engineering decisions. By the end of this book, you will be able to build efficient and maintainable systems software in Zig & confidently apply the language to production projects.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
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Lock Free Chapter
1
Part 1: Zig Foundations
6
Part 2: Systems Programming in Practice
17
Index

Exercises

  • Implement Sharded Locking: The current zcache implementation protects the entire cache with a single mutex. Under concurrent load, all threads contend for the same lock regardless of which keys they are accessing, which limits throughput as the number of connections grows. Redesign the cache to use N independent shards, each containing its own hash map, LRU list, and mutex. Use the hash of the key to select the shard — for example, shard_index = hash(key) % N. A thread operating on key A and a thread operating on key B will now only contend if both keys map to the same shard. Once the implementation is complete, benchmark it against the single-mutex version using the existing benchmark client with ‑‑conns 50 and ‑‑conns 200. Observe where throughput plateaus in each implementation and measure how the sharded version responds as the connection count increases. A shard count of 16 or 64 is a reasonable starting point — experiment...
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83
Tech Concepts
36
Programming languages
73
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Systems Programming with Zig
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