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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

Summary

In this chapter, we explored how Zig empowers systems programming through support for threads, processes, forking, and signal handling. Threads allow concurrent execution within a program, making it easier to perform multiple tasks simultaneously and put multiple CPU cores to work. Forking, through the fork(2) system call, enables a process to create child processes that run independently, forming the foundation of UNIX-style multitasking. By learning to handle signals like SIGINT and SIGTERM, we provided our programs with the mechanisms necessary to clean up resources and exit gracefully, ensuring our background services remain robust and responsive. We synthesized these concepts by building zcron, which demonstrates how to make a process run in the background and maybe become a service, manage periodic task execution through execve(2), and respond to asynchronous events.

In the next chapter, we are going to create professional concurrent applications that take advantage...

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Systems Programming with Zig
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