zf VS zig-clap

You can absolutely make CLI tools, but be prepared for breaking changes in the language with every release. I've been working on a fuzzy finder zf for a couple of years now, and with each Zig release there are a few things to fix. It's not a ton of work, but it is something to be aware of.

I’ve absolutely had satisfaction with my several personal projects written in Zig. And based on an imperfect measurement (GitHub stars) I have also had moderate success in making something useful. It’s a terminal fuzzy finder [0]. I also maintain a Zig Lua bindings package [1], and I’m working on a port of an old Macintosh game [2].

Zig is exactly what I want out of a language though, so take my opinion with a grain of salt :)

[0]: https://github.com/natecraddock/zf

[1]: https://github.com/natecraddock/ziglua

[2]: https://github.com/natecraddock/open-reckless-drivin

This looks awesome! As someone who is already pretty invested in trouble.nvim and native integrations with Telescope and GitSigns (to name just two), what do you feel are the selling points? I wonder how you see integrations evolving too? In example, I use zf via telescope-zf-native.nvim over fzf and have had to do little to let other plugins fallback into that.

I have long preferred the strictness of the fzy algorithm over fzf for fuzzy finding both in my shell and in neovim. But there are things about fzy that have bothered me (like the inability to narrow down results with space-delimited query terms). So I have been working on zf and libzf (written in Zig if you care about that sort of thing) for the shell and integration with neovim.

Zig and Rust both promote explicit error handling, however their mechanisms are different. Rust uses Result enums, while Zig uses a (global) error set type (though similar to an enum) and error propagation. Similarly, Rust uses the Option enum for optional types, while Zig uses a type modifier (?T). Both offer modern, syntactic sugar to handle those (call()? and if let Some(value) = optional {} in Rust, try call() and if (optional) |value| {} in Zig). Since Rust uses the standard library to implement error handling and options, users have the possibility to extend those systems which is quite powerful. However, I like the approach Zig takes in providing those things as language features. While their approach fits well into the C universe, I dislike that there is no pragmatic way to add more context to an error (but well, no allocations). Libraries like [clap](https://github.com/Hejsil/zig-clap) solve this by implementing a diagnostics mechanism.

It's somewhat early, but there are libraries like https://github.com/Hejsil/zig-clap that can make writing CLIs a bit easier.

Command line args: std.process or the zig-clap library