SDL.zig VS pacman.zig

SDL Bindings: https://github.com/MasterQ32/SDL.zig

What you can do is stick to popular packages, e.g. these Zig bindings for SDL2 have decent instructions on how to install the system dependencies on popular OS's.

For a somewhat more complete example which runs in browsers, check out my little pacman.zig toy project [0]. This is cheating a bit by using Emscripten toolchain as 'sysroot' (needed for the Emscripten headers), and the Emscripten linker to create the html+js+wasm output file, but the actual code is all compiled with the Zig compiler.

The interesting part is that the platform abstraction is provided by the sokol headers [1], with auto-generated Zig bindings [2]. It's interesting because the C headers use "Emscripten magic" (mainly embedding Javascript snippets in the C sources via the EM_JS() macro), and the Zig compiler is able to compile this (when it has access to the Emscripten headers).

It would be nice if the "Emscripten platform" could get the same type of cross-compilation support as the desktop platforms eventually, but apart from bundling the Emscripten headers, this would also require to implement some of the "Emscripten magic" in the linker step.

Maybe projects like WaJIC can help with this (this basically implements the "Emscripten magic" of embedding Javascript snippets in C/C++ source code, but without Emscripten (only the wasm-opt tool is needed AFAIK).

Anyway... it's a lot of fun to tinker around with this stuff in Zig, and watch how it's all taking shape :)

[0] https://github.com/floooh/pacman.zig

My advice would be: to learn a new language, start writing some non-trivial projects in it (a few thousand lines of code or so). In some languages (like Python), the standard library is the actually important feature, in other languages (like C), it better to mostly ignore the stdlib. Example: I started learning Zig by writing a Pacman clone (https://github.com/floooh/pacman.zig) and a home computer emulator (https://github.com/floooh/kc85.zig), the Pacman clone doesn't use any Zig stdlib features at all, and the emulator only minimally for parsing command line args and loading data from files.

Zig's stdlib is much more useful than C's, but it's still entirely possible to write useful programs without it and instead focus on learning Zig's language features first.

But on the other extreme, the whole point why I learned Python was its "batteries included" standard library.