zig-gamedev VS Cello

Two game frameworks in the making: https://github.com/michal-z/zig-gamedev & https://github.com/hexops/mach

I did a hangman game, I'm doing a file compression tool next. I asked bing chat to recommend beginner projects for zig and that's what it told me. It also suggested a cli calculator and a cli text editor, but I didn't want to do that. My next thing will be something using https://github.com/michal-z/zig-gamedev

This repo may be useful. It isn't an engine or a renderer, but rather a collection of useful libraries if you do end up writing your own tools. https://github.com/michal-z/zig-gamedev

Something like vulkano in Rust or zig-gamedev in zig might be a much more enjoyable approach: They're similarly bare metal languages but have a lot of advantages over C++ (borrow checker's safety, simpler syntax). However, they're not commonly used by big studios.

I've been working on a gamedev project in zig, using zig-gamedev. It has many libraries you can use, though my game is 2D. Feel free to check out my project if you want to see how I set things up. https://github.com/foxnne/aftersun

Language-level guarantees of memory safety are not critical to all low-level programmers, and sometimes this is fine!

Developers of games, compilers, digital audio workstations, video editors, and live performance software (such as openFrameworks) likely don't rank memory safety as their top concern.

Zig is already an attractive choice for those domains because it offers:

- Great compile times compared to C++/Rust, and future plans to implement hot reloading as a core part of the tooling: https://www.jakubkonka.com/2022/03/16/hcs-zig.html

- The ability to reason about where data exists in memory: https://ziglang.org/documentation/master/#Where-are-the-byte...

- Good readability and learnability, especially if you have a C/C++ background.

- Comptime that enables clean generics, compile-time reflection and general metaprogramming as a happy side-effect: https://kristoff.it/blog/what-is-zig-comptime/

- Better tooling than C/C++. The ability to cross-compile Zig and C/C++ from one machine lets you set up much more stable and reproducible build environments already. You can clone zig-gamedev and have the demos working with just three commands on Windows/macOS/Linux, for example, and two of those three are cloning the repo and changing to the directory: https://github.com/michal-z/zig-gamedev (to build you will need the latest copy of Zig from the 'masters' section for your platform at https://ziglang.org/download/ )

We should all be careful about insinuating that memory unsafe languages should not exist. I see “friends don't let friends use memory-unsafe languages” on social media and feel sick. It's much healthier to embrace the melting pot of Zig, Odin, D, Beef, Vale, Hare, Lobster, Jai, C3, Val, Roc and all the rest and see what new ideas and trade-offs they bring.

Also worth noting that new languages tend to take time to develop their own philosophies to memory safety (Vale's approach is only just now emerging, for example: https://verdagon.dev/blog/making-regions-part-1-human-factor ). Zig's story might not be great now ( https://www.scattered-thoughts.net/writing/how-safe-is-zig/ ), but then it's not Zig's priorty at the moment, and Zig's full story is not yet written.

Yes, that's C. C macros can take you quite far. Unfortunately because it's just a bunch of macros, it's quite brittle. Like high level abstractions created with macros in assembly language. You have to do all the checking and reasoning about it since the compiler cannot.

[1] https://libcello.org/

It took me a long time to understand, coming from higher level programming, that a lot of exactly that "higher level" is just systematic fat pointer conventions. And because pointers-with-metadata is not a first-class language construct, we invent all these languages that codify a particular fat pointer convention. Cello is an example of what kinds of abstractions can be built on top of a tiny little bit of (non-native) fat pointer convention.

There is a lightweight object oriented extension to C called Objective-C [1] that unfortunately never gained much traction outside the NeXT/Apple ecosystem. There is also Cello [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objective-C

[2] https://github.com/orangeduck/Cello

Regular expressions library to validate information before dumping to rocksdb.

https://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_node/Regular-E...

Non-critical implimentation fun, use cello [1] for 'gawk' functionality in C with C++ objects/classes.

[1] https://libcello.org/

You can achieve a fairly decent runtime safety for some types of project. Check out libcello and my own monster (libstent, lame presentation).

towards lisp related data structures / algorithms (aka recursive tree data structures & algorithms).

So, no distinction between metadata vs. structual storage unless noted.

Anything beyond that tends towards masters & upper level undergraduate level material. aka review the implimentation of a programming language for algorithm & data structure usage per language features.

aka Autonoma / regular expressions backround: Lisp in Small Pieces by Christian Queinnec; ; https://github.com/aalhour/awesome-compilers; On Lisp by Paul Graham; Let over Lambda by Doug Hoyte; C 'macro's pushed to maximum effect : https://libcello.org/

    Left out Comparison of languages; Transform from lang a to lang b; and language implimentation as discussions tend to assume masters / upper level undergraduate knowledge

with skills like this, mind to push cello forward? https://github.com/orangeduck/Cello really like it but not skillful enough to do it myself.