zig-gamedev VS vos

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.

The creator of V made some big claims that raised a few eyeballs, they've gained a reasonable following over the years, have a pretty serious looking website (https://vlang.io) a beer-money level Patreon following and some corporate partnerships/sponsors. However have experienced some pretty brutal takedowns over the years, with some of the bolder claims about the language/compiler being exposed as being.

A word I keep seeing in relation to V is "aspirational" - the project aspires to be a serious language with some major features, so I think it's fair to approach it with a more critical eye than one would a kid's side-project. I think HN would have been pretty understanding if they were open about the state of the various features and were a little less defensive when they encounter articles that treat it like a Real Language and review it as such. If the authors don't want this kind of feedback they can just say front-and-centre (or on their FAQ @ https://github.com/vlang/v/wiki/FAQ) "this is a toy" or "this is pre-alpha"

Autofree has existed for years and can work. Here is a demo. It is used in V's Vinix OS, Ved, and other applications. Part of the issue is there are detractors who purposefully spread misinformation nor know about its other memory options, and the other part is understanding how to use it.

Another option is to write the kernel in V. Vinix is an OS written in V. You can use it for reference when building your project.

And that's why vinix [1] is full of manual free call? That tells how good autofree is, isn't it? Can you compile v compiler with autofree? Last time I checked, you can't.

[1] https://github.com/vlang/vinix/search?q=free&type=code

vweb, volt, and ved are not a "little more than alpha"

yes, the os is being developed in V, and it can already run bash, GCC, G++, and Doom.

https://github.com/vlang/vinix

It's a great concept, but languages like Rust (https://www.rust-lang.org/), Zig (https://ziglang.org), Vlang (https://vlang.io/), etc... are already running with a similar idea to being easy to interact with C and are viable alternatives to it as well. Vlang even created its own OS, Vinix (https://github.com/vlang/vinix), to show its capabilities in this regard.

Seems to me, Cello would be more for those C programmers that didn't want to try the various alternative languages that are now out, and happen to agree with its developer's interpretation of what high level constructs would look like. The point of these alternative languages is to offer features that C doesn't have or to implement them in easier or clearer ways.

Vinix shows the capabilities of V on bare metal, in additional to it being useful for high-level programming as well. https://github.com/vlang/vinix