zenc

Zen C is a modern systems programming language whose compiler emits human-readable GNU C/C11 rather than a custom bytecode or runtime. Its stated goal is to combine high-level ergonomics with the performance and interoperability of C, and it maintains full C ABI compatibility so generated code can link against existing C libraries. Language features described in the README include type inference, pattern matching, generics, traits, async/await, and manual memory management with RAII-style facilities. The compiler is written in C and built with make; a Windows batch script and a portable "Actually Portable Executable" build via Cosmopolitan Libc are also documented, the latter producing a single binary intended to run on Linux, macOS, Windows and several BSDs on x86_64 and aarch64. Tooling includes a command-line compiler (zc) with run, build and transpile subcommands, a REPL (zc-repl) using in-process JIT compilation via LibTCC, a language server (zc-lsp) supporting go-to-definition, references, hover, completion, document symbols, signature help and diagnostics, and a documentation generator (zc-doc). Debugging is done with standard C debuggers such as LLDB or GDB, and editor integrations exist for VS Code, Vim/Neovim and Zed. The standard library covers collections (Vec, Map, Set, Stack, Queue), strings with UTF-8 support, option and result types, filesystem, I/O, paths, environment, networking (TCP, UDP, HTTP, DNS, URL), threads, time, JSON, regex, SIMD types, arbitrary-precision integers and floats, complex numbers, process management and CUDA helpers. A built-in unit testing framework provides named test blocks, non-fatal assertions, and an exit code equal to the number of failed tests. Output backends can target C, C++, CUDA, Objective-C, JSON, AST dumps, Common Lisp and Graphviz, with backend-specific options. The compiler can also be embedded as a C library through public headers. The README notes test-suite results against GCC, Clang, Zig and TCC, and mentions MISRA C:2012 compliance testing with an explicit disclaimer of affiliation.