sokol-zig VS go

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

Now, I’m not going to use C++ again; I left that chapter years ago, and it’s not going to happen. C++ isn’t memory safe and easy to use and would require extended time for developers to adapt. Rust is the new kid on the block, but I’ve heard mixed opinions about its developer experience, and there aren’t many libraries around it yet. LLRD is too new for my taste, but **Go** caught my attention.

Generative AI development has been democratised, thanks to powerful Machine Learning models (specifically Large Language Models such as Claude, Meta's LLama 2, etc.) being exposed by managed platforms/services as API calls. This frees developers from the infrastructure concerns and lets them focus on the core business problems. This also means that developers are free to use the programming language best suited for their solution. Python has typically been the go-to language when it comes to AI/ML solutions, but there is more flexibility in this area. In this post you will see how to leverage the Go programming language to use Vector Databases and techniques such as Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) with langchaingo. If you are a Go developer who wants to how to build learn generative AI applications, you are in the right place!

net/http: add methods and path variables to ServeMux patterns Discussion about ServeMux enhancements

Make sure you have Go installed https://go.dev/.

The Go Programming Language

When Go first shipped, it was already well-documented that the only stable ABI on some platforms was via dynamic libraries (such as libc) provided by said platforms. Go knowingly and deliberately ignored this on the assumption that they can get away with it. And then this happened:

https://github.com/golang/go/issues/16606

If that's not "getting burned", I don't know what is. "Trying to provide a nice feature" is an excuse, and it can be argued that it is a valid one, but nevertheless they knew that they were using an unstable ABI that could be pulled out from under them at any moment, and decided that it's worth the risk. I don't see what that has to do with "not being as broadly compatible as they had hoped", since it was all known well in advance.

Sadly, I think that is indeed radically different from Go’s design. Go lacks anything like sum types, and proposals to add them to the language have revealed deep issues that have stalled any development. See https://github.com/golang/go/issues/57644

I've been writing a lot about Go and gRPC lately: