Introduction

Welcome to The Zirco Programming Language, an introduction and reference for the programming language Zirco, which helps you write clean, expressive code while maintaining explicitness, control, and compatibility with existing systems languages. Zirco is intentionally very similar to languages like C, with a focus on improved syntax and quality of life features.

Caution

Zirco is an unstable, rapidly evolving language. Absolutely nothing about the language and its semantics are stable, and that includes this book. This book is a best-effort attempt to document Zirco, but it may be out of date. Please refer to the Stability section for more information on Zirco’s stability and how it may affect you.

Who This Book Is For

This book is intended to be primarily a reference for experienced users, but it can also be used as an introduction. It covers the syntax and semantics of the language, as well as best practices for writing Zirco code. It also includes a reference section that provides detailed information about the language’s features and standard library.

This book assumes the reader has at least some prior experience with low-level programming, manual memory management, and systems programming concepts. It is not intended for complete beginners to programming, and will not cover some of those concepts in depth. However, we do not assume any prior experience with Zirco or C itself, and will cover all of the language’s features from the ground up.

How to Use This Book

This book is organized into several sections, each covering a different aspect of the language. The sections are designed to be read in order, but you can also jump around, using this book as a reference manual / specification instead.

Contributing

This book is open source and contributions are welcome! If you find a mistake, have a suggestion for improvement, or want to add something new, please feel free to open an issue or submit a pull request. We appreciate any help in making this book better for everyone.