Install Zig 0.13, build a hello-world with zig build-exe, read the four release modes — Debug, ReleaseSafe, ReleaseFast, ReleaseSmall — against the same source file, and cross-compile to a Linux musl target with one -target flag. The week's payoff is the moment a Linux binary falls out of a macOS host with no extra toolchain — the same primitive that drives every later Lambda and edge-runtime deployment.

The optimization matrix on a 4096-by-4096 matrix multiply — Zig versus Rust versus Go on the same workload — measuring binary size, cold-start, and steady-state throughput across all four release modes. The week teaches the measurement loop that turns "is this faster?" into "by how much, on which dimension, against which baseline?" — the same loop that drives the Lambda and edge decisions in later weeks.

Build the marcopolo command-line tool from std.process.argsAlloc with a GeneralPurposeAllocator and std.testing.allocator so a leak fails the test suite, then walk all four standard-library allocators side by side — GPA for application code with debug-mode leak detection, ArenaAllocator for parse-and-discard scopes that free everything in a single deinit, FixedBufferAllocator for stack-only buffers with no heap, and page_allocator for direct mmap-backed allocations.

A 30-line HTTP server using std.net plus std.http, then the multi-stage Dockerfile that lands the final image at single-digit megabytes against a scratch base, then the use-case map for AWS Lambda, edge runtimes, and embedded targets where the binary footprint and cold-start budget dominate the workload's value over the borrow checker's compile-time payoff.

Zig idioms a Rust developer trips on, when to reach for comptime versus a runtime branch, the Rust-or-Zig decision rule for a data-engineering team, the FFI patterns that let Zig call Rust and Rust call Zig over a C-ABI seam, and the path to Zig 1.0 that tells you which 0.13 features are stable to ship today versus which features need a feature-flag strategy.

A culminating practice assignment that synthesizes every framework and pattern from Weeks 1 through 6 into one shippable production Zig component. Pick a Lambda or edge target, walk the four-card framing on the workload, build the Zig handler with a logic-versus-wiring split, ship the multi-stage Dockerfile against a scratch base, and add the named-contract assertInvariant helper that fires on container start before the binary fetches its first invocation. The reference implementation that grounds every deliverable lives at https://github.com/paiml/zig-from-zero — the workspace ships five demos (hello, marcopolo, http-server, sqlite-ws, lambda) that walk every standard-library allocator and every deployment target the course covers.