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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

Enforcing protocol correctness with comptime

Before examining the code, it is worth grounding the comptime parser in concrete terms. Consider what happens with a hand-written parser when the MemQueryResp struct gains a new field — say, a swap_mb value to report swap usage. With a hand-written approach, you must remember to update the encoder, update the decoder, update any size constants, and update any documentation that describes the wire format. Miss any one of those, and the parser silently reads the wrong value into the wrong field with no error until a live message produces nonsense output. With the comptime parser, adding the field to the struct is the only change required. The encoder and decoder are regenerated automatically on the next build because they are derived from @typeInfo(MemQueryResp) at compile time. There is no separate parser file to synchronize. A second scenario involves field types. Suppose a developer tries to add a f64 field to store a CPU utilization...

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Systems Programming with Zig
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