liwords VS pacman.zig

Check out https://woogles.io (disclaimer I am a cofounder). AGPLV3 platform with world class bots, puzzles, a free analyzer, clubs/tournaments, and more to come. You can see the source code at https://github.com/woogles-io/liwords. We recently hit 5M games played and have hosted a few major tournaments.

A small team of us work on a project https://github.com/domino14/liwords - this is an online crossword-board-game playing website. We have around 6000 MAU, are fully free and open-source, and need a lot of coding help!

We built woogles.io (a crossword board game playing site with almost 10K MAU) in Go. See https://github.com/domino14/liwords

https://github.com/domino14/liwords - warning it’s not that well-developed but it’s ok

A small team and I made https://woogles.io - we were inspired by lichess to make a site to play crossword board games during the pandemic (like Scrabble, Words with Friends, etc).

We did raise money on Kickstarter - 25K but are purely donations-driven and open source (AGPL3) Most months we just get enough to cover the cost of running the servers. We have around 6000 monthly active users, have hosted several big worldwide championships, have puzzles, and just earlier today released a board editor / broadcast mode for annotating real life games in real time. We also have a top notch bot AI and WASM-based analyzer.

Our stack is Go, Typescript + React, with NATS/PGSQL on the backend.

woogles.io

The people behind those websites and apps have no clue this software exists. The exception is woogles.io because it is associated with the Macondo AI. /u/14domino is the brain behind both of those things

https://woogles.io raised $25K on Kickstarter and built a more beautiful site. Come join us (we’re still taking donations :)

- Playing online: there is woogles.io which I personally would recommend; it's made by players for players and is free to use. Among the features are: play against humans, play against strong bots, tournaments, feedback on your moves after the game, availability of different languages and game variants. Other options are: playscrab.com (also made by players for players); isc.ro (the Internet Scrabble Club); the app Scrabble Go and, if you don't mind playing with slightly altered game rules, Wordfeud, which comes along with a large online league (not technically affiliated with the app itself).

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.