Zig Foundations covers: Learning Zig. Learn Zig's philosophy of explicit control, allocators, comptime, and C interoperability. Understand why "no hidden control flow" matters.
| Ruby/Rails | Zig |
|-----------|-----|
| GC handles all memory | You choose an allocator for every allocation |
| nil crashes at runtime | Optionals are explicit: ?T |
| begin/rescue | Error unions: !T + try + catch |
| Metaprogramming (define_method, method_missing) | Comptime: evaluated at compile time, zero runtime cost |
| gem install foo | zig fetch + build.zig.zon (no central registry yet) |
| C extensions (native gems) | Direct C interop — just @cImport the header |
| bundle exec rails server | Single static binary, zero dependencies |
This course unlocks once you've finished its prerequisite. Open prerequisite →
Zig is the most niche language in this curriculum. The community is small, the ecosystem is immature, and finding a Zig job is nearly impossible today. If you're doing this for ca…
Ruby's whole bargain is concealment, and you've profited from it for years: the GC hides memory, ActiveRecord hides SQL, metaprogramming hides entire class definitions behind a de…
Work through each item before the checkpoint.
Three encounters with what Go and Rust hide: allocators as explicit arguments (with leak detection in the tests), C interop with no wrapper layer, and comptime as the generics sto…
4 lessons. Read in order; spiral back when you need to. By the end you'll have used the core ideas twice — once on the abstract, once on something you'll meet at work next week.