go-tools VS zig-gamedev

Another useful tool in Go is the go vet command, which helps to identify common coding mistakes such as unreachable code or useless comparisons. In addition, external linters like staticcheck can be used to detect bugs and performance issues with ease.

For the last year or so (as of 2023) Golang has only had one active project for linting unused code, namely: unused from https://github.com/dominikh/go-tools. It works really well, but only within a package, not across packages, like within a traditional monolith. unused used to be part of another project called staticcheck, that did indeed have a flag for detecting project-wide unused code, but that is no longer supported. There are good reasons for that (see this Github discussion), mainly that it's computationally expensive.

To a degree, sure. It can't pick it up in general, because of the halting problem. But some trivial cases could be caught. Feel free to write such a linter, I'm sure Dominik would gladly merge it, for example.

IDE: use whatever make you productive. I personally use vscode. VCS: git, as golang communities use github heavily as base for many libraries. AFAIK Linter: use staticcheck for linting as it looks like mostly used linting tool in go, supported by many also. In Vscode it will be recommended once you install go plugin. Libraries/Framework: actually the standard libraries already included many things you need, decent enough for your day-to-day development cycles(e.g. `net/http`). But here are things for extra: - Struct fields validator: validator - Http server lib: chi router , httprouter , fasthttp (for non standard http implementations, but fast) - Web Framework: echo , gin , fiber , beego , etc - Http client lib: most already covered by stdlib(net/http), so you rarely need extra lib for this, but if you really need some are: resty - CLI: cobra - Config: godotenv , viper - DB Drivers: sqlx , postgre , sqlite , mysql - nosql: redis , mongodb , elasticsearch - ORM: gorm , entgo , sqlc(codegen) - JS Transpiler: gopherjs - GUI: fyne - grpc: grpc - logging: zerolog - test: testify , gomock , dockertest - and many others you can find here

Also proposal to staticcheck, will see if it goes through! https://github.com/dominikh/go-tools/issues/1337

This is the first result for that error in google. The comment in that issue explains it. You're building two array's c_code, and c_start_date which are built and then never read or returned or otherwise used.

This really irritated me when I started working with go, but it stopped bothering me and now I even mostly like it.

The missing error checks are annoying, but if you have appropriate editor config it is hard to miss them: https://cdn.billmill.org/static/newsyctmp/warning.png

Basically writing go without `staticcheck`[1] is not recommended. If you do have it set up, it's pretty easy to avoid simple errors like that.

[1]: https://staticcheck.io/

However, recently [per this issue](https://github.com/dominikh/go-tools/issues/1270) it is safe to re-enable the ones I highlighted with strikethrough above. I would be interested in tracking issues for the remainder if you have those linked somewhere.

Unfortunately I don't know of any tools that can/do always detect it. There's this discussion for the staticcheck linter where they basically don't think it's worth false positives in order to support it a lint for it.

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.