Privacy
This is a static site. It has no accounts, no login, no comment system, and no server that could store anything about you. The pages are files on a CDN.
What the site itself stores
The guide sets no cookies of its own, and runs no server that could log your visits. Your browser keeps four choices in its local storage: light or dark, the palette, an open or closed sidebar, and decorations on or off. A fifth value shows that the decoration animation played in this tab. The browser deletes that value when you close the tab. These values stay in your browser, and the site never sends them anywhere. Code that you run in a playground runs entirely in your browser as WebAssembly. The code is never uploaded. When you leave the page, your browser discards the edits that you made to a snippet. The search index is a static JSON file. Your browser downloads the file and searches it locally, so the text that you type into the search box is never sent to a server.
Measurement
The site uses Google Analytics to count how many people read it, which chapters they read, and approximately where in the world they are. Google Analytics records these items:
- the page that you are on
- the link that sent you here
- your browser and your device type
- a location at the level of a country, derived from your IP address
Google Analytics sets a cookie, so that it counts two page loads from the same browser as one visit and not two. There is no login here, and nothing asks for your name or email. Thus none of this data is tied to an identity.
To stop the measurement entirely, block the domains googletagmanager.com and google-analytics.com, or use a browser that blocks trackers. Nothing on the site needs the measurement. Every page, playground and search works in the same way with it or without it.
Advertising
This site may use Google AdSense to show advertisements. Where advertising is enabled, Google and its advertising partners may use cookies and device identifiers to serve and measure ads. Where Google has a legal basis, they may also use cookies and device identifiers to personalise ads, based on your earlier visits to this site and to other sites.
You can disable personalised advertising at Google Ad Settings. Google explains how it uses data from sites that use its services, on its partner sites policy page. To refuse third-party vendor cookies from more companies, go to aboutads.info. You can also block cookies in your browser. The guide itself does not need cookies.
Third parties the pages contact
Ad requests go to the advertising domains of Google. Analytics beacons go to the measurement domains of Google. This domain serves everything else that the site needs, for example the compiler artifacts and the editor. Links to other sites, for example ziglang.org or Codeberg, are ordinary links. If you click one, you visit that site under its own policy.
YouTube
The short video cards at the end of a chapter or blog post, and on the home page, show riddles and jokes from YouTube. When the site is built, the build reads the list of videos from the public feed of the channel. The site does not read the feed when you visit.
The card at the end of a chapter or post starts to play by itself, with the sound off, when half of the card is on your screen. At that time, the page loads the YouTube player from youtube-nocookie.com, which is the privacy-enhanced mode of YouTube. YouTube then receives your IP address and browser details, as any video site does. YouTube may store data in your browser when the video plays. The privacy policy of Google applies to the player. If you never scroll to the card, nothing from YouTube loads.
The video does not start by itself in these conditions: your system is set to reduce motion, or your browser has data saver on. The cards on the home page never start by themselves. In those cases, nothing from YouTube loads until you press Play. With JavaScript off, Play is a link that opens the video on YouTube.
Contact
Rajesh Pillai maintains this guide. Send questions about this page to pillai.rajesh@gmail.com, or to the issue tracker if the answer is useful to everyone. The contact page lists every route.