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Book Overview & Buying
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Table Of Contents
Systems Programming with Zig
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Data flows in from various sources through command-line utilities and transforms on the fly before ever touching permanent storage. In this chapter, we shift our focus to stream processing with a single unifying question behind every tool we build: how fast can we make it, and why? This is performance-oriented systems programming — the discipline of understanding not just whether code is correct, but whether it is working with the hardware or against it. We will build a suite of classic UNIX tools to explore how Zig handles I/O efficiency, moving beyond simple file reading to master the art of buffering, understand the high cost of system calls, harness the power of SIMD instructions for data-parallel processing, and implement high-performance encoding logic using bitwise operations. By the end of the chapter, every benchmark result will have an explanation rooted in hardware behavior, and every design decision will have...