pacman.c VS zig

Floooh's pacman.c is an outstanding one file implementation of Pacman in C. He uses his own very good libraries (called sokol) to do the graphics and audio but you can definitely learn a lot from reading the code. It is very accurate too - it's based off the Pacman Dossier (copy included).

Some of my favorites are: sokol/pacman.c, Gunslinger, and gb

Not "serious" at all but I wrote a Pacman clone over the holidays as an excercise and test for my cross-platform C header bindinds:

https://github.com/floooh/pacman.zig

...and before that I did the same in C99 (might be useful for comparing the languages):

https://github.com/floooh/pacman.c

Disclaimer: I'm not a Zig expert at all, and the project doesn't really require most things where Zig differs from C. But I think writing small and "for-fun" projects like this is important for getting used to a language. I think one of Zig's big qualities is that it is so straightforward, after a few hundred lines you hardly have to look up things in the language documentation anymore.

There is an issue proposing this approach: https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/4284

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.

When writing code in a scripting language, sometimes you need that extra bit of performance (or maybe an async feature from Zig).

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.

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 also has an IRC channel on libera (#zig) that is moderated by Andrew Kelley.[1]

[1] https://github.com/ziglang/zig/wiki/Community