Open-source Zig book
zigbook.net
Open-source Zig book
1–10 of 426 posts
Re: Open-source Zig book
#2So despite this...
> The Zigbook intentionally contains no AI-generated content—it is hand-written, carefully curated, and continuously updated to reflect the latest language features and best practices.
I just don't buy it. I'm 99% sure this is written by an LLM.
Can the author... Convince me otherwise?
> This journey begins with simplicity—the kind you encounter on the first day. By the end, you will discover a different kind of simplicity: the kind you earn by climbing through complexity and emerging with complete understanding on the other side.
> Welcome to the Zigbook. Your transformation starts now.
...
> You will know where every byte lives in memory, when the compiler executes your code, and what machine instructions your abstractions compile to. No hidden allocations. No mystery overhead. No surprises.
...
> This is not about memorizing syntax. This is about earning mastery.
Re: Open-source Zig book
#3This looks fantastic. Pedagogically it makes sense to me, and I love this approach of not just teaching a language, but a paradigm (in this case, low-level systems programming), in a single text.
Zig got me excited when I stumbled into it about a year ago, but life got busy and then the io changes came along and I thought about holding off until things settled down - it's still a very young language.
But reading the first couple of chapters has piqued my interest in a language and the people who are working with it in a way I've not run into since I encountered Ruby in ~2006 (before Rails hit v1.0), I just hope the quality stays this high all the way through.
Re: Open-source Zig book
#4It looks cool! No experience with Zig so can't comment on the accuracy, but I will take a look at it this week. Also a bit annoying that there is no PDF version that I could download as the website is pretty slow. After taking a look at the repository (https://github.com/zigbook/zigbook/tree/main), each page seems to be written in AsciiDoc, so I'll take a look about compiling a PDF version later today.
Re: Open-source Zig book
#5So despite this... > The Zigbook intentionally contains no AI-generated content—it is hand-written, carefully curated, and continuously updated to reflect the latest language features and best practices. I just don't buy it. I'm 99% sure this is written by an LLM. Can the author... Convince me otherwise? > This journey begins with simplicity—the kind you encounter on the first day. By the end, you will discover a dif…
You can't just say that a linguistic style "proves" or even "suggests" AI. Remember, AI is just spitting out things its seen before elsewhere. There's plenty of other texts I've seen with this sort of writing style, written long before AI was around.
Can I also ask: so what if it is or it isn't?
While AI slop is infuriating, and the bubble hype is maddening, I'm not sure every time somebody sees some content they don't like the style of we just call out it "must" be AI, and debate if it is or it isn't is not at least as maddening. It feels like all content published now gets debated like this, and I'm definitely not enjoying it.
Re: Open-source Zig book
#6So despite this... > The Zigbook intentionally contains no AI-generated content—it is hand-written, carefully curated, and continuously updated to reflect the latest language features and best practices. I just don't buy it. I'm 99% sure this is written by an LLM. Can the author... Convince me otherwise? > This journey begins with simplicity—the kind you encounter on the first day. By the end, you will discover a dif…
Who cares?
Still better than just nagging.
Re: Open-source Zig book
#7So despite this... > The Zigbook intentionally contains no AI-generated content—it is hand-written, carefully curated, and continuously updated to reflect the latest language features and best practices. I just don't buy it. I'm 99% sure this is written by an LLM. Can the author... Convince me otherwise? > This journey begins with simplicity—the kind you encounter on the first day. By the end, you will discover a dif…
I was pretty skeptical too, but it looks legit to me. I've been doing Zig off and on for several years, and have read through the things I feel like I have a good understanding of (though I'm not working on the compiler, contributing to the language, etc.) and they are explained correctly in a logical/thoughtful way. I also work with LLMs a ton at work, and you'd have to spoon-feed the model to get outputs this cohesive.
Re: Open-source Zig book
#8there's no way someone made this for free, where do I donate? im gonna get so much value from this this feels like stealing
Re: Open-source Zig book
#9Some text is unreadable because it is so small.
Re: Open-source Zig book
#10[flagged]