Zig Best Practices

Zig Best Practices

Follows type-first, functional, and error handling patterns from CLAUDE.md. This skill covers Zig-specific idioms only.

Type System Patterns

Tagged unions for mutually exclusive states — prevents invalid combinations that a struct with multiple nullable fields would allow:

const RequestState = union(enum) {
    idle,
    loading,
    success: []const u8,
    failure: anyerror,
};

Explicit error sets — documents exactly what can fail; anyerror hides failure modes:

const ParseError = error{ InvalidSyntax, UnexpectedToken, EndOfInput };
fn parse(input: []const u8) ParseError!Ast { ... }

Distinct types for domain IDs — compiler prevents mixing up different ID types:

const UserId = enum(u64) { _ };
const OrderId = enum(u64) { _ };

Comptime validation — catch invalid configurations at compile time, not runtime:

fn Buffer(comptime size: usize) type {
    if (size == 0) @compileError("buffer size must be greater than 0");
    return struct { data: [size]u8 = undefined, len: usize = 0 };
}

Memory Management