zig-wefx
pacman.zig
zig-wefx | pacman.zig | |
---|---|---|
1 | 3 | |
6 | 204 | |
- | - | |
4.3 | 7.6 | |
4 months ago | 6 days ago | |
Zig | Zig | |
- | MIT License |
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zig-wefx
pacman.zig
-
Zig and WASM
For a somewhat more complete example which runs in browsers, check out my little pacman.zig toy project [0]. This is cheating a bit by using Emscripten toolchain as 'sysroot' (needed for the Emscripten headers), and the Emscripten linker to create the html+js+wasm output file, but the actual code is all compiled with the Zig compiler.
The interesting part is that the platform abstraction is provided by the sokol headers [1], with auto-generated Zig bindings [2]. It's interesting because the C headers use "Emscripten magic" (mainly embedding Javascript snippets in the C sources via the EM_JS() macro), and the Zig compiler is able to compile this (when it has access to the Emscripten headers).
It would be nice if the "Emscripten platform" could get the same type of cross-compilation support as the desktop platforms eventually, but apart from bundling the Emscripten headers, this would also require to implement some of the "Emscripten magic" in the linker step.
Maybe projects like WaJIC can help with this (this basically implements the "Emscripten magic" of embedding Javascript snippets in C/C++ source code, but without Emscripten (only the wasm-opt tool is needed AFAIK).
Anyway... it's a lot of fun to tinker around with this stuff in Zig, and watch how it's all taking shape :)
[0] https://github.com/floooh/pacman.zig
- Cross-platform build with 3rd-party libraries?
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To Learn a New Language, Read Its Standard Library
My advice would be: to learn a new language, start writing some non-trivial projects in it (a few thousand lines of code or so). In some languages (like Python), the standard library is the actually important feature, in other languages (like C), it better to mostly ignore the stdlib. Example: I started learning Zig by writing a Pacman clone (https://github.com/floooh/pacman.zig) and a home computer emulator (https://github.com/floooh/kc85.zig), the Pacman clone doesn't use any Zig stdlib features at all, and the emulator only minimally for parsing command line args and loading data from files.
Zig's stdlib is much more useful than C's, but it's still entirely possible to write useful programs without it and instead focus on learning Zig's language features first.
But on the other extreme, the whole point why I learned Python was its "batteries included" standard library.
What are some alternatives?
zig-wasm-logger - A simple implementation of console.log() in Zig + JS + Wasm
libcxx - Project moved to: https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project
minimal-zig-wasm-canvas - A minimal example showing how HTML5's canvas, wasm memory and zig can interact.
SDL.zig - A shallow wrapper around SDL that provides object API and error handling
Dodgeballz - A mini game using Zig, WASM and JS
julia - The Julia Programming Language
zig-wasm-test - A minimal Web Assembly example using Zig's build system.
liwords - A site that allows people to play a crossword board game against each other
sokol-zig - Zig bindings for the sokol headers (https://github.com/floooh/sokol)