CodeLLDB VS sokol-zig

Ok, so apparently here they are called 'data formatters' instead of pretty printers or debug helpers... https://github.com/vadimcn/codelldb/wiki/Custom-Data-Formatters

For debugging lldb supports python scripts: https://github.com/vadimcn/codelldb/wiki/Data-visualization

I use VS Code on Linux to debug Zig. Haven't tried the others you mentioned, but it just emits standard DWARF symbols, so I'm guessing if you can debug C/C++ you could probably also do Zig with minimal changes? I just use the lldb VS code plugin[0], which works out of the box for me with no issues.

https://github.com/vadimcn/codelldb

It's pretty bad, unfortunately. As you discovered, using the gnu toolchain works better with code-lldb (see more info here), but it still isn't great. CLion is a little better, but costs money and lacks support in other ways compared to VSCode.

- I tried to install codelldb: https://github.com/vadimcn/vscode-lldb without success.

Are you on Windows or Linux? On Windows I've had nothing but trouble getting code-lldb to display debug info for any sort of nontrivial data structure due to this issue, which means I need to switch to x86_64-pc-windows-gnu, but then that breaks other upstream crates that use cc to compile C++ code.

I've been using vscode-lldb with VS Code on macos, and I've been very happy with the experience so far.

Check this: https://github.com/vadimcn/vscode-lldb/wiki/Breakpoints-are-not-getting-hit

yeah since they updated the rust compiler for windows to use a different style of debugger symbols and since they changed that in CodeLLDB the variables output have not been the same. Though i believe the owner has been trying to fix it. But any issues you do have report them on the codeLLDB git https://github.com/vadimcn/vscode-lldb

Zig currently doesn't allow chained designators and also doesn't allow to partially initialize arrays and fill up the rest of the array with default values.

E.g. the closest Zig equivalent to this C99 code:

https://github.com/floooh/sokol-samples/blob/b3bc55c4411fa03...

...is this:

https://github.com/floooh/sokol-zig/blob/a4b3c287fadd153a504...

...note how part of the initialization had to be moved out into "code".

There's a ticket about this here, but it's currently not high-priority:

https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/6068

I maintain auto-generated bindings for my C libraries for Zig and Nim (and Odin and Rust - although the Rust bindings definitely need some love to make them a lot more idiomatic).

I think looking at the examples (which is essentially the same code in different languages) gives you a high level idea, but they only scratch the surface when it comes to language features (things like the Zig code not using comptime features):

Zig: https://github.com/floooh/sokol-zig/tree/master/src/examples

Nim: https://github.com/floooh/sokol-nim/tree/master/examples

Odin: https://github.com/floooh/sokol-odin/tree/main/examples

Rust: https://github.com/floooh/sokol-rust/tree/main/examples

IMHO you really need a programming language to describe a build, even when the result looks very declarative.

E.g. not sure how Meson handles this, but when I have a project with dozens of similar build targets and platform specific compile options, I really want to do the build description in a loop instead of a data tree.

(for example: https://github.com/floooh/sokol-zig/blob/3f978e58712f9eb029b...)

Is this project comparable to the zig sokol project?https://github.com/floooh/sokol-zig

I was rather amazed that I could cross-compile the zig-sokol examples https://github.com/floooh/sokol-zig for a Windows target on a Linux host (WSL Ubuntu). I simply set -target x86_64-windows and copied the executable into Windows and got a nice spinning cube displayed.

(disclaimer: shameless plug) Here's another cross-platform alternative, auto-generated Zig bindings to the Sokol headers:

https://github.com/floooh/sokol-zig

This is quite a bit slimmer than using one of the WebGPU libraries like wgpu-rs or Dawn, because sokol-gfx doesn't need an integrated shader cross-compiler (instead translation from a common shader source to the backend-specific shader formats happens offline).

Eventually I'd also like to support the Android, iOS and WASM backends from Zig (currently this only works from C/C++, for instance here are the WASM demos: https://floooh.github.io/sokol-html5/)

I'm tackling this issue from two sides:

(1) Change the C-API to make it more "binding-generator-friendly", for instance by adding a range/slice-struct to th C-API which bundles a pointer and associated size, or specially named typedefs that only exist to give the binding generator hints for special case handling.

(2) Make the bindings-generator configurable on a per-language and per-API basis, this can be as simple as a map which overrides type- and function-names, or injects manually written code into the generated bindings.

The goal is to make the generated bindings more idiomatic to the target language.

This mostly works if you have control over the underlying C-API of course, e.g. the language bindings are created by the original C-library project, not as an external project to convert a fixed C-API.

I wrote a blog post about this whole topic:

https://floooh.github.io/2020/08/23/sokol-bindgen.html

...and here's an example of one such semi-auto-generated Zig bindings, note the two "injected" helper functions at the top:

https://github.com/floooh/sokol-zig/tree/master/src/sokol

...for instance note the "injected" helper functions here:

https://github.com/floooh/sokol-zig/blob/1c93f60ad178869b84d...

As you can see from the comments there are lots of options. Sokol is another one https://github.com/floooh/sokol-zig