Zig on ilikeorangutans

Zig, Memory, and the mysterious `170`

Sat, 06 Sep 2025 11:06:48 -0400

I’m hacking on a small Zig application with a GTK frontend, and part of using GTK is passing around ?*anyopaque pointers and you never quite know if it’s working. In my app I’m passing around a struct that holds a ~~string~~ []const u8 to various GTK callbacks. However the string was empty. This led me down a rabbit hole of trying to figure out if my pointers were correctly passed, even going as far as stepping through it with a debugger. Turns out, the pointers are all correct. Even my ~~string~~ []const u8 was there with the correct length, except every single byte was set to 170 and I realized I was looking at undefined memory. Zig in debug mode sets undefined memory to 0xaa which is 170.

Zig Fetch

Wed, 17 Jul 2024 12:18:03 -0400

Zig’s package manager is still a bit rough. It only supports fetching tarballs, but many github projects don’t have them unless they have a release. There’s a trick to fetch any commit as a tarball though:

One Billion Row Challenge in Zig

Sun, 05 May 2024 13:54:44 -0400

I finally got around to looking into The One Billion Row Challenge. If you’re unfamiliar, it’s a challenge to how fast a program can read and process one billion rows. It’s fascinating because it’s all about raw performance including algorithms, CPU instructions, and profiling and benchmarking. All things I enjoy dabbling with.

Zig - First Impressions

Mon, 23 Oct 2023 19:50:27 -0400

I’ve been following the zig language for a while ever since I saw Andrew Kelly’s talk on Corecursive. The way Andrew describes the design of zig was very engrossing and who doesn’t like a language build for speed. But I have struggled with picking it up; time is in short supply and so were docs for zig when I first looked at it.

But that has changed; I finally found some motivation and ziglearn.org which is a good introduction to zig. I have only managed to read the first two chapters, much less understand them but it’s enough to be dangerous (to myself?).