Using Raylib with Zig

24 December 2024

For my December Adventure I had to figure out how to use the Raylib library with Zig. It’s not difficult but it’s also not well documented, so I decided to write up the steps here.

I’ve tested this with Zig 0.14 and Raylib 5.5 under Linux. I’m assuming Zig is already installed; otherwise the only dependencies should be standard Linux utilities such as tar.

Download & install Raylib

Go to the Raylib release page and download the “source” .tar.gz file. It includes a Zig build file, so we can build it with zig build:

tar xf raylib-5.5.tar.gz
cd raylib-5.5
zig build --release=fast

This puts the output in zig-out:

raylib-5.5$ tree zig-out/
zig-out/
├── include
│   ├── raylib.h
│   ├── raymath.h
│   └── rlgl.h
└── lib
    └── libraylib.a

We’ll install it by just copying the files:

sudo cp zig-out/include/*.h /usr/local/include/
sudo cp zig-out/lib/libraylib.a /usr/local/lib/

Use Raylib in Zig

To use Raylib in Zig code, import the header file as follows:

const ray = @cImport({
   @cInclude("raylib.h");
});

Now Raylib’s types, functions, and constants are available with the ray. prefix, for example ray.BLACK and ray.DrawTriangle.

To build the code, we have to tell Zig to link with libc and raylib. If you’re running zig directly, add -lc -lraylib to the command line. If you use a build.zig file, add the following:

exe.linkSystemLibrary("raylib");
exe.linkLibC();

For full sample code, see build.zig and triangle.zig. It shows… a triangle: