zig-gamedev VS rust

Two game frameworks in the making: https://github.com/michal-z/zig-gamedev & https://github.com/hexops/mach

I did a hangman game, I'm doing a file compression tool next. I asked bing chat to recommend beginner projects for zig and that's what it told me. It also suggested a cli calculator and a cli text editor, but I didn't want to do that. My next thing will be something using https://github.com/michal-z/zig-gamedev

This repo may be useful. It isn't an engine or a renderer, but rather a collection of useful libraries if you do end up writing your own tools. https://github.com/michal-z/zig-gamedev

Something like vulkano in Rust or zig-gamedev in zig might be a much more enjoyable approach: They're similarly bare metal languages but have a lot of advantages over C++ (borrow checker's safety, simpler syntax). However, they're not commonly used by big studios.

I've been working on a gamedev project in zig, using zig-gamedev. It has many libraries you can use, though my game is 2D. Feel free to check out my project if you want to see how I set things up. https://github.com/foxnne/aftersun

Language-level guarantees of memory safety are not critical to all low-level programmers, and sometimes this is fine!

Developers of games, compilers, digital audio workstations, video editors, and live performance software (such as openFrameworks) likely don't rank memory safety as their top concern.

Zig is already an attractive choice for those domains because it offers:

- Great compile times compared to C++/Rust, and future plans to implement hot reloading as a core part of the tooling: https://www.jakubkonka.com/2022/03/16/hcs-zig.html

- The ability to reason about where data exists in memory: https://ziglang.org/documentation/master/#Where-are-the-byte...

- Good readability and learnability, especially if you have a C/C++ background.

- Comptime that enables clean generics, compile-time reflection and general metaprogramming as a happy side-effect: https://kristoff.it/blog/what-is-zig-comptime/

- Better tooling than C/C++. The ability to cross-compile Zig and C/C++ from one machine lets you set up much more stable and reproducible build environments already. You can clone zig-gamedev and have the demos working with just three commands on Windows/macOS/Linux, for example, and two of those three are cloning the repo and changing to the directory: https://github.com/michal-z/zig-gamedev (to build you will need the latest copy of Zig from the 'masters' section for your platform at https://ziglang.org/download/ )

We should all be careful about insinuating that memory unsafe languages should not exist. I see “friends don't let friends use memory-unsafe languages” on social media and feel sick. It's much healthier to embrace the melting pot of Zig, Odin, D, Beef, Vale, Hare, Lobster, Jai, C3, Val, Roc and all the rest and see what new ideas and trade-offs they bring.

Also worth noting that new languages tend to take time to develop their own philosophies to memory safety (Vale's approach is only just now emerging, for example: https://verdagon.dev/blog/making-regions-part-1-human-factor ). Zig's story might not be great now ( https://www.scattered-thoughts.net/writing/how-safe-is-zig/ ), but then it's not Zig's priorty at the moment, and Zig's full story is not yet written.

Rust

It seems to be more fussy about compiler optimizations, though: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/125543

apimock-rs is one of my projects on API mock Server generating HTTP/JSON responses to help to develop microservices and APIs, written in Rust.

Rust, the language itself depends on 220 packages: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/blob/e8753914580fb42554a79...

If you trust nobody, it is hard to use anything.

But about your second note, (environment, mismatched dependencies), I would argue that Rust provides the best tooling to solve or identify issues on that area.

rustc source code

First look is into The Unstable Book. Well, it does not look informative but gives us some background from the rust-lang Github project-const-generics. It says:

Rust has been around for several years and works well as a system and general programming language. There are many fine introductions to the language, a good place to start is here: https://www.rust-lang.org/

‍For the rest of this post I’ll list off some more tactical examples of things that you can do towards this goal. Savvy readers will note that these are not novel ideas of my own, and in fact a lot of the things on this list are popular core features in modern languages such as Kotlin, Rust, and Clojure. Kotlin, in particular, has done an amazing job of emphasizing these best practices while still being an extremely practical and approachable language.

> There are online Rust compilers and interpreters already if you just want to rapid prototype and develop ideas in Rust

You are responding to one of the key developers of Rust early on[1], who's been working with the language for 14 years at that point.

[1] https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/graphs/contributors?from=2... and he's still #16 in commits overall today, despite almost no activity on the rust compiler since 2014.

If you haven't dipped your touch-typing fingers into Rust yet, you really owe it to yourself. Rust is a modern programming language with features that make it suitable not only for systems programming -- its original purpose, but just about any other environment, too; there are frameworks that let your build web services, web applications including user interfaces, software for embedded devices, machine learning solutions, and of course, command-line tools. Since a custom GitHub Action is essentially a command-line tool that interacts with the system through files and environment variables, Rust is perfectly suited for that as well.