pacman.zig
sokol-zig
pacman.zig | sokol-zig | |
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3 | 9 | |
204 | 291 | |
- | - | |
7.6 | 9.0 | |
8 days ago | 8 days ago | |
Zig | C | |
MIT License | - |
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pacman.zig
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Zig and WASM
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
- Cross-platform build with 3rd-party libraries?
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To Learn a New Language, Read Its Standard Library
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.
sokol-zig
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Zig cookbook: collection of simple Zig programs that demonstrate good practices
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
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Nim v2.0 Released
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
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Zig Build System
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...)
- Zig and WASM
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Mach v0.1 - cross-platform Zig graphics in ~60 seconds
Is this project comparable to the zig sokol project?https://github.com/floooh/sokol-zig
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How does zig magically cross compile without target shared libraries
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.
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Mach Engine: The Future of Graphics (With Zig)
(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/)
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Making Win32 APIs More Accessible to More Languages
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...
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Game Development
As you can see from the comments there are lots of options. Sokol is another one https://github.com/floooh/sokol-zig
What are some alternatives?
libcxx - Project moved to: https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project
zig-bgfx-sdl2 - Minimal zig project to get bgfx running with sdl2
SDL.zig - A shallow wrapper around SDL that provides object API and error handling
bigger - bigg (bgfx + imgui + glfw + glm) + utils
zig-wefx - WEFX is a simple graphics drawing package using Zig, WASM, and an HTML canvas.
sokol-samples - Sample code for https://github.com/floooh/sokol
julia - The Julia Programming Language
go - The Go programming language
minimal-zig-wasm-canvas - A minimal example showing how HTML5's canvas, wasm memory and zig can interact.
JNA - Java Native Access
Dodgeballz - A mini game using Zig, WASM and JS
ffmpeg - FFmpeg Zig package