zig VS zig-gamedev

Finished up to 109.

Kinda sad that async is broken and there's a huge pile of gatekeeping requirements against bringing it back. https://github.com/ziglang/zig/wiki/FAQ#what-is-the-status-o...

Actually, nobody.

Here is the commit where Reader/Writer was introduced: https://github.com/ziglang/zig/commit/5e212db29cf9e2c06aba36...

This is a few months after `git init`. You can see I was really just working on the parser, with a toy example to get things started.

Over time, I merged contributions that made minor changes and shuffled things around, and these APIs evolved to kind of work okay. But nobody really considered "the Zig IO stack" as a whole and put in design effort. That is happening for the first time right now.

This list's Zig as an entry, despite the Zig project having very clear plans[0] for a 1.0 release. That's not 0ver, it's just the beta stage of semver.

[0] https://github.com/ziglang/zig/milestone/2

I usually structure teaching the same way done in https://www.writethedocs.org/videos/eu/2017/the-four-kinds-o.... So "the Quick Walkthrough Guide will explain what dk scripts are and give you small examples to run" is simply a learning-oriented tutorial which is mostly about giving students confidence and visual feedback. And simultaneously it an explanation of nothing (the video has a great explanation for why to do that). So, I agree that an explanation of threads + Internet + cross-compilation would quite nuts, but for an experienced developer I'd expect to see a meaty example (take a look at https://ziglang.org/ for comparison).

One concrete action may be to make two distinct Quick Start guides ... one for the experienced and one for the inexperienced students though. Is that your thinking?

> I feel like I can write powerful code in any language, but the goal is to write code for a framework that is most future proof, so that you can maintain modular stuff for decades.

I like Zig a lot, but long-term maintainability and modularity is one of its weakest points IMHO.

Zig is hostile to encapsulation. You cannot make struct members private: https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/9909#issuecomment-9426...

Key quote:

> The idea of private fields and getter/setter methods was popularized by Java, but it is an anti-pattern. Fields are there; they exist. They are the data that underpins any abstraction. My recommendation is to name fields carefully and leave them as part of the public API, carefully documenting what they do.

You cannot reasonably form API contracts (which are the foundation of software modularity) unless you can hide the internal representation. You need to be able to change the internal representation without breaking users. I hope Zig reverses this decision someday and supports private fields.

> Did Zig really do that?

https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/544#issuecomment-61807...

> In order to simplify everything, tabs are not allowed. Spaces are necessary; we can't ban spaces.

They seem to be open to the alternative but not to a solution that isn't forced on people:

> Maybe someday, we'll switch to tabs for indentation, spaces for alignment and make it a compile error if they are incorrectly mixed

Zig already has a builtin code formatter that automatically changes formatting to their preference, but that's not enough.

Zig solved this by not having a string type at all and not shipping full Unicode support in std: https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/234#issuecomment-27630....

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