zf VS ziglua

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.

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

Zig has a build system (the zig build command) that uses a build.zig file to compile a project. With a git submodule you just add the directory as a package in the build.zig file. Depending on the dependency, there might be a few more steps. For example, for my ziglua library requires adding the package path (so you can @import the zig sources), and also calling the link function which compiles the Lua C source and links with the Zig project.

ziglua was released, which "takes advantage of Zig's features to make it easier and safer to interact with the Lua API."