Emitting an Executable

The commands zig build-exe, zig build-lib, and zig build-obj can be used to output executables, libraries and objects, respectively. These commands take in a source file and arguments.

Some common arguments:

• -fsingle-threaded, which asserts the binary is single-threaded. This will turn thread safety measures such as mutexes into no-ops.
• -fstrip, which removes debug info from the binary.
• --dynamic, which is used in conjunction with zig build-lib to output a dynamic/shared library.

Let's create a tiny hello world. Save this as tiny-hello.zig, and run zig build-exe .\tiny-hello.zig -O ReleaseSmall -fstrip -fsingle-threaded. Currently for x86_64-windows, this produces a 2.5KiB executable.

const std = @import("std");

pub fn main() void {
    std.io.getStdOut().writeAll(
        "Hello World!",
    ) catch unreachable;
}