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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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1
Part 1: Zig Foundations
6
Part 2: Systems Programming in Practice
17
Index

Fetching and using external libraries

For the purposes of this section, we are going to use an external library found at https://github.com/mactsouk/tsdist-zig and host all relevant files inside ch02/ts. To manage these integrations, Zig employs a decentralized package manager powered by a file named build.zig.zon (Zig Object Notation). This manifest defines the project dependencies not by vague names or registry tags but by precise URLs and cryptographic hashes. This design guarantees reproducible builds: because every dependency is pinned to a specific hash, you can be certain that if your project compiles today, it will compile the same way in the future, even if the upstream source changes.

The build system as infrastructure as code

Zig reimagines the build process by discarding static configuration files in favor of a full-fledged imperative programming model. Instead of dealing with Makefiles or CMake lists, you define your build pipeline using standard Zig code within...

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Systems Programming with Zig
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