One of Zig’s strongest features is its seamless interoperability with C. You don’t need to write bindings or wrappers manually; Zig can understand C header files directly.

Importing C Headers

You can import C headers using the built-in @cImport function.

const c = @cImport({
    @cInclude("stdio.h");
    @cInclude("stdlib.h");
});

pub fn main() void {
    _ = c.printf("Hello from C!\n");
}

Zig parses the header file and exposes the C types and functions as if they were Zig code.

Zig is also a C Compiler

The Zig compiler (zig cc) can compile C and C++ code. This means you can easily mix C files into your Zig project build.

Translating C to Zig

Zig even includes a tool to translate C code into Zig code automatically.

zig translate-c main.c

This is incredibly useful for porting legacy codebases or understanding how a specific C construct maps to Zig.

No FFI Overhead

Because Zig shares the same memory layout and ABI compatibility with C, calling C functions has no overhead. It’s just a function call.

// Calling a standard C function
const time = c.time(null);

This makes Zig an excellent choice for extending existing C projects or gradually rewriting them.