ziglua VS gyro

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."

gyro

In the meantime, there are a few community-developed options - gyro is one of them

You can give gyro or zigmod a try.

I'm not a Zig user, so the above is just my understanding/interpretation of the comment. FWIW a cursory googling for Zig package manager did confirm that there are several (e.g. gyro, zigmod) without an official one.

This is the first in a series of blog posts dedicated to package management for zig. The main purpose is to spark conversation within the community after starting my own package manager, gyro. I'm not advocating for it and it's design decisions to be incorporated into the official PM, merely using it to explore the solution space.