Hello world circa Zig 0.1.1

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1

I’m in the process of rebuilding some demos that I have. One of them happens to be using the tarball of Zig 0.1.1 as input data. I found it amusing looking at this really early version. Thought maybe you guys would be amused too.

Here’s the “hello world” program:

const io = @import("std").io;

pub fn main() -> %void {
    %return io.stdout.printf("Hello, world!\n");
}

I didn’t start tracking the project until 0.10.0 so I missed out on percentage-sign era. What was the thinking behind that?

Here’s the link to my demo app if you want to look at other files in the earliest of Zig tarballs.

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2

I haven’t seen the percentage sign syntax either, how curious! I love little historical things like this; thanks for sharing.

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3

This is probably just the author’s personal preference. I’m also designing a query language, but my approach is different.
I’m trying to take the best practice from various languages.

4

The percentage sign seems to be related to error handling. From example/cat/main.zig:

            var is = io.InStream.open(arg, null) %% |err| {
                %%io.stderr.printf("Unable to open file: {}\n", @errorName(err));
                return err;
            };
5

They are indeed error handling, here’s a post detailing why and how they got replaced:

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