prologue VS sokol-zig

If you want to try an alternative to Jester, Prologue is very nice to use: https://github.com/planety/prologue

Well no language is perfect, but Nim can be used in almost every domain because of it's compilation targets(C, C++, JS) and it's fast compile times(who needs interpretation when compile times are that fast!):

* Shell scripting, I still assume most people will just use Bash tho: https://github.com/Vindaar/shell

* Frontend: https://github.com/karaxnim/karax or you could bind to an existing JS library.

* Backend: For something Flask-like: https://github.com/dom96/jester or something with more defaults https://github.com/planety/prologue

* Scientific computing: the wonderful SciNim https://github.com/SciNim

* Blockchain: Status has some of the biggest Nim codebases currently in production https://github.com/status-im?q=&type=&language=nim&sort=

* Gamedev: Also used in production: https://github.com/pragmagic/godot-nim and due to easy C and C++ interop, you get access to a lot of gamedev libraries!

* Embedded: this is a domain I know very little about but for example https://github.com/elcritch/nesper or https://github.com/PMunch/badger for fun Nim+embedded stuff!

Most of the disadvantages come from tooling and lack of $$$ support.

It doesn't https://github.com/planety/prologue/blob/devel/prologue.nimble

Jester is really great but I feel Prologue should get some attention too.

Nice! I want to also suggest the Prologue framework - here are the docs

Prologue is a great web framework in the Nim world. However, Prologue framework tries to avoid using macros. It is intended to reduce magic and reduce surprise. Macros could save you from redundant codebases. At the mean time, it could bring surprise. This article talks about how to extend the routing style outside Prologue without invading inside the web framework.

Prologue is a powerful and extensible web framework written in Nim language.

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

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

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...)

Is this project comparable to the zig sokol project?https://github.com/floooh/sokol-zig

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.

(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/)

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...

As you can see from the comments there are lots of options. Sokol is another one https://github.com/floooh/sokol-zig