Ziglings is an engaging way to learn zig basics

** Sat, Nov 8, 2025 ** 2-minute read

I’m learning zig (enough to get by) and it’s an engaging and simple way to get started.

To learn a new language I’d typically find a blog or series of articles and follow along. This can be a little tedious because I like to type things out and run the code myself.

Often I’d sick of the tedium of writing the boilerplate, or find articles that miss all the context or supporting code the scaffolds the learning point.

Ziglings (like Rustlings, which I haven’t tried) instead sets up all of that for you in a single repo.

Each “zigling” is an intentionally broken program with comments on how to get it working. This is great because you can use whatever IDE you’re comfortable with and test things quickly.

I found a couple exercises didn’t explain clearly for me which is great because it forces me to research why. For me that improves my learning outcomes.

Anyway I’m 30+ ziglings in and the language has some cool features. So far I think my favourite is errdefer which is like defer but only executes on an error.

Snippet from the exercise:

fn makeNumber() MyErr!u32 {
std.debug.print("Getting number...", .{});

// Please make the "failed" message print ONLY if the makeNumber()
// function exits with an error:
errdefer std.debug.print("failed!\n", .{});

var num = try getNumber(); // <-- This could fail!

num = try increaseNumber(num); // <-- This could ALSO fail!

std.debug.print("got {}. ", .{num});

return num;
}

Outputs:

Getting number...got 5. Getting number...failed!

Whilst zig is potentially more low level than I typically need I am interested in learning it because of that. I need a reason to go deeper in my computer science fundamentals (I am self-taught).

After the exercises I think I’ll write a simple JWT decoder CLI - it’s something I use a lot in my $dayjob.

Tags:

#zig #learning