cro_skill

Overview

This skill helps you write Zig code in the practical, teaching-focused style of Loris Cro, emphasizing build system mastery, pragmatic patterns, and clear explanations. It guides you to build real applications, leverage C interop, and adopt Zig idioms that scale from small scripts to production systems. Use it to learn idiomatic Zig or to shape code and build scripts for real projects.

How this skill works

The skill inspects your project layout and suggests concrete changes to build.zig, project structure, and coding patterns that match Cro's philosophy. It offers examples for linking C libraries, structured logging, testing with the leak-detecting allocator, and cross-compilation. It returns succinct, actionable code snippets and explanations you can drop into your repo.

When to use it

• Starting a new Zig project and establishing build.zig as the source of truth
• Integrating an existing C library via @cImport and idiomatic wrappers
• Adding tests, leak detection, and fuzz targets during development
• Preparing for cross-compilation or supporting multiple targets
• Teaching Zig idioms or reviewing code for practical production readiness

Best practices

• Make build.zig the canonical place for targets, optimize flags, and install/run/test steps
• Prefer standard library utilities (ArrayList, StringHashMap, JSON parser) over custom implementations
• Wrap C libraries in small, safe Zig abstractions instead of full rewrites
• Write tests alongside code and use the testing allocator to detect leaks
• Configure structured logging early and expose log level as a build-time option
• Profile before optimizing and keep optimizations behind feature flags

Example use cases

• Create a build.zig that produces an executable, test artifact, and convenient run/test steps
• Wrap sqlite3 with a small Database struct using @cImport and safe error mapping
• Add scoped structured logging and a build-time log level constant
• Write unit and fuzz tests that use testing.allocator and catch memory leaks
• Cross-compile a CLI tool by exposing a -Dtarget option and platform-specific switch blocks