mach
zig
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mach | zig | |
---|---|---|
36 | 816 | |
2,773 | 30,631 | |
5.4% | 5.2% | |
9.7 | 10.0 | |
6 days ago | 1 day ago | |
Zig | Zig | |
GNU General Public License v3.0 or later | MIT License |
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.
mach
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Zig Software Foundation 2024 Financial Report and Fundraiser
Myself and many others are betting on Zig in major ways, I truly think it has a bright future ahead.
In spare time, myself and a few others are working on a game engine in Zig[0], and the Zig core team has been very receptive to addressing issues our project faces and supporting us.
Others are working on pixel art editors[1], open source 2D RPG games[2], there's a group of independent folks working on a 3D massive immersive sim game[3], a group working on making Zig an amazing language for micro-controllers[4], etc.
Please consider donating $5-10 a month to the ZSF! They are a great group of people, and it has so many knock-on effects for others in the FOSS community. :)
[0] https://machengine.org/
[1] https://github.com/foxnne/pixi
[2] https://github.com/foxnne/aftersun
[3] https://github.com/Srekel/tides-of-revival
[4] https://github.com/ZigEmbeddedGroup
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DevDocs
I don't know if there's anything better than a zip. For our website[0] which includes a bunch of docs for our game engine, Zig packages, etc. we just offer a link "offline version of this site" in the footer which is an ~80MB zip file.
I think the challenge with zip files is.. do you want all the images? do you want all versions of the docs, or just a specific version of the docs? It's hard to tailor the zip to the user's desire. But zip still seems to be the best.
[0] https://machengine.org/
- Not only Unity...
- Mach - Zig game engine & graphics toolkit
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New Béziers from Math
Cool to see others working on this problem. I hope more people do.
Funnily I've seen a lot of programmers and math folks who express how truly, genuinely beautiful Beziers and the math behind them are. But I've never met an artist or graphic designer who didn't express some deep frustration at Bezier controls and how hard they are to work with.
There are even games[0] which make a mockery out of how hard Bezier controls are to use, where the game is purely using the controls.
Controls are just one side of the problem, in my view; the other side is that cubics are terrible for GPUs, they don't understand them - and I believe many of the best 2D graphics libraries today are not even fully GPU accelerated, e.g. Skia. There are folks working on compute shader-based approaches, where we try to shoe-horn this CPU-focused algorithm into GPUs and pray - but it still isn't really suitable.
The controls suck for artists, and the math sucks for GPUs. This is only true of cubics, if you restrict yourself to quadratics (although that brings other challenges), both the control issue goes away (you can just click+drag the curve!) and the performance issue goes away (quadratics are triangles, GPUs love them)
That's the summary of the talk[1] I gave at SYCL'22. In that talk, I didn't have time to present the downsides of quadratics (which are real) - so if you watch it please keep that in mind - but my overall point I think is a solid one: the controls suck, and GPUs can't handle them.
The only reason we stick with cubics in its current form is because of SVG, compatibility with existing tooling, etc. But isn't it crazy? We have new bitmap image formats all the time, and so few vector graphics formats.
In Mach engine[2] we're continuing to explore this space, end-to-end, from author tooling -> format -> rendering. I'm not claiming we have a perfect solution, we don't, but we're at least thinking about this problem. Kudos to the authors of this article for thinking about this space as well.
[0] https://bezier.method.ac/
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QTybQ-5MlrE
[2] https://machengine.org
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0.11.0 Release Notes
A game engine https://machengine.org is being written in zig, there's also https://microzig.tech as zig is well suited to embedded development.
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Significant examples of Zig software (June 2023)?
https://github.com/hexops/mach (shameless plug)
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Learn WebGPU
Zig fits pretty naturally here too. We've got ~19 WebGPU examples[1] which use Dawn natively (no browser support yet), and we build it using Zig's build system so it 'just works' out of the box with zero fuss as long as you grab a recent Zig version[2]. No messing with cmake/ninja/depot_tools/etc.
WASM support in Zig, Rust, and C++ is also not equal. C++ prefers Emscripten which reimplements parts of popular libraries like SDL, for me personally that feels a bit weird as I don't want my compiler implementing my libraries / changing how they behave. Rust I believe generally avoids emscripten(?), but Zig for sure lets me target WASM natively and compile C/C++ code to it using the LLVM backend and soon the custom Zig compiler backend.
[1] https://github.com/hexops/mach-examples
[2] https://github.com/hexops/mach#supported-zig-version
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Zig for gamedev?
We're building Mach which aims to be competitive with Unity/Unreal/Godot in spriti, but super modular / let you pick and choose which parts to use or build yourself.
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Mach (Zig) Adventures - Part 1
git clone --recursive https://github.com/hexops/mach-examples cd mach-examples/ zig build run-sprite2d
zig
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Memory-mapped IO registers in Zig. (2021)
There is an issue proposing this approach: https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/4284
- Zig Programming Language
- Zig Language 0.12 Release
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Zig 0.12.0 Release Notes
https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/224
e.g.:
> > When debugging/prototyping, it's useful to comment out a line without having to refactor, e.g.
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How to Write a PHP Extension with Zig?
When writing code in a scripting language, sometimes you need that extra bit of performance (or maybe an async feature from Zig).
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Bun - The One Tool for All Your JavaScript/Typescript Project's Needs?
NodeJS is by no means a slow runtime, it wouldn’t be so popular if it was. But compared to Bun, it’s slow. Bun was built from the ground up with speed in mind, using both JavascriptCore and Zig. The Bun team spent an enormous amount of time and energy trying to make Bun fast, including lots of profiling, benchmarking, and optimizations.
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Bun 1.1
ntdll.dll!RtlUserThreadStart()
There are valid reasons to use APIs from NTDLL. Where I disagree with zig#1840 is the idea that it is always better to use NTDLL versions of API. Every other software ecosystem uses the standard Win32 APIs and diverging from that without a good reason seems like a good way to have unexpected behavior. One concrete example is most users and programmers expect Windows to redirect some file system paths when running on WOW64. But this is implemented in Kernel32, not ntdll.
https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/11894
- Zig, Rust, and Other Languages
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Nanos – A Unikernel
Zig also has an IRC channel on libera (#zig) that is moderated by Andrew Kelley.[1]
[1] https://github.com/ziglang/zig/wiki/Community
- Ask HN: What Underrated Open Source Project Deserves More Recognition?
What are some alternatives?
SDL.zig - A shallow wrapper around SDL that provides object API and error handling
Nim - Nim is a statically typed compiled systems programming language. It combines successful concepts from mature languages like Python, Ada and Modula. Its design focuses on efficiency, expressiveness, and elegance (in that order of priority).
quickjs-emscripten - Safely execute untrusted Javascript in your Javascript, and execute synchronous code that uses async functions
Odin - Odin Programming Language
zigstr - Zigstr is a UTF-8 string type for Zig programs.
v - Simple, fast, safe, compiled language for developing maintainable software. Compiles itself in <1s with zero library dependencies. Supports automatic C => V translation. https://vlang.io
arocc - A C compiler written in Zig.
rust - Empowering everyone to build reliable and efficient software.
mach-glfw-vulkan-example - mach-glfw Vulkan example
go - The Go programming language
glibc_version_header - Build portable Linux binaries without using an ancient distro
ssr-proxy-js - A Server-Side Rendering Proxy focused on customization and flexibility!