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: Explicit error sets — documents exactly what can fail; anyerror hides failure modes: Distinct types for domain IDs — compiler prevents mixing up different ID types: Comptime validation — catch invalid configurations at compile time, not runtime: Memory Management Pass allocators explicitly to every function that allocates; no global allocator state. Place defer resource.deinit() immediately after acquisition — keeps cleanup co located with creation. Use errdefer for cleanup on error paths; defer for unconditional cleanup. Use arena allocators for batch/temporary work; they free everything at once. Use std.testing.allocator in tests — reports leaks with stack traces. Key Conventions Prefer const over var ; prefer slices over raw pointers. Prefer comptime T: type over anytype ; explicit types produce clearer errors. Use anytype only for genuinely polymorphic cases (callbacks, std.debug.print style). Exhaustive switch : include an else returning an error or unreachable for truly impossible cases. Use std.log.scoped(.module name) for namespaced logging; define a module level const log constant. Larger cohesive files are idiomatic — tests alongside implementation, comptime generics at file scope. Advanced Topics Generic containers (queues, stacks, trees): See [GENERICS.md](GENERICS.md) C library interop (raylib, SDL, curl): See [C INTEROP.md](C INTEROP.md) Debugging memory leaks (GPA, stack traces): See [DEBUGGING.md](DEBUGGING.md) Tooling zigdoc — browse std library and dependency docs: ziglint — static analysis with .ziglint.zon config: References Language Reference: https://ziglang.org/documentation/0.15.2/ Standard Library: https://ziglang.org/documentation/0.15.2/std/ Zig Guide: https://zig.guide/

zig-best-practices