Why Zig?

Zig is an excellent programming language for embedded systems.

Explicit allocators: Zig’s convention of passing an allocator interface to functions that may allocate results in a single standard library that is seamlessly used on freestanding targets.
Cross-compilation: Zig’s powerful build system targets many embedded architectures, MicroZig builds on top of this system to target specific microcontrollers.
C interop: Directly include and link to C code with no FFI overhead.
Strategic friction: aspects of programming that are tricky need to be explicit and even verbose at times. Nullable pointers, pointer casting, integer conversions, etc.

Why MicroZig?

Tooling: MicroZig extends the Zig build system for Microcontrollers. This includes:
- Generating memory-mapped IO bindings from register descriptions
- Generating a default linker script for your microcontroller (which you can override).
- Giving you access to modules that provide high-level APIs for interacting with your CPU.
Low-cost Abstractions: No abstraction is zero cost, but we’ve found the right fit at different layers. For example, our MMIO interface feels high-level, but every call results in a single read-modify-write to a register.
Bring your own hardware: MicroZig is developed as a monorepo, but you can switch out any layer and use the overall framework. Provide your own register definitions for an uncontributed microcontroller, or build a custom PCB, yet still use the MicroZig build system and extra components such as our generic driver library.