3 ms·

I made a tiny roguelike game in Zig a few months back and was really impressed. One thing I really appreciate about the language is the emphasis on keeping thi

I made a tiny roguelike game in Zig a few months back and was really impressed. One thing I really appreciate about the language is the emphasis on keeping things simple. I heard someone put it really well yesterday: when you're programming in Zig, you spend your time tackling the original problem, not tackling the language. Also, the article's complaints may be valid, but most of them are very superficial, which speaks to good language design, in my opinion.

anoncow419 5y ago
Do you have a public repository for said game you published?
sk1pper 5y ago
Hmm, I didn't find that quite to be the case. I wrote a toy GPU-accelerated (using OpenGL via C) terminal emulator in Zig. My take is that I'll probably wait for at least a 1.0 before I start hacking my side projects in it again. My main issue was around finding good documentation and (not-outdated) examples, which I guess just comes with using a bleeding-edge language. The biggest thing I find lacking is a "Learn Zig" book that takes you through the whole language. Sure, https://ziglearn.org/ https://ziglearn.org/ exists, but it needs about 10 more chapters. Zig types can get somewhat complex, especially when interfacing with C, for example - I remember some difficulty deciphering those. For many things I ended up just reading Zig's source code itself, especially when looking up standard library stuff. I mean I get it, who wants to write a book for a language whose features are unstable? On the plus side, I agree that I fought Zig a _lot_ less than when I first started learning Rust. And I still fight Rust if anything involving generics and/or nontrivial annotations is involved.
exdsq 5y ago
> you spend your time tackling the original problem, not tackling the language. Would you say it's as good or better than Lisp?

3 ms·

I made a tiny roguelike game in Zig a few months back and was really impressed. One thing I really appreciate about the language is the emphasis on keeping thi

by verdagon 5y ago

anoncow419 5y ago
Do you have a public repository for said game you published?
sk1pper 5y ago
Hmm, I didn't find that quite to be the case. I wrote a toy GPU-accelerated (using OpenGL via C) terminal emulator in Zig. My take is that I'll probably wait for at least a 1.0 before I start hacking my side projects in it again. My main issue was around finding good documentation and (not-outdated) examples, which I guess just comes with using a bleeding-edge language. The biggest thing I find lacking is a "Learn Zig" book that takes you through the whole language. Sure, https://ziglearn.org/ https://ziglearn.org/ exists, but it needs about 10 more chapters. Zig types can get somewhat complex, especially when interfacing with C, for example - I remember some difficulty deciphering those. For many things I ended up just reading Zig's source code itself, especially when looking up standard library stuff. I mean I get it, who wants to write a book for a language whose features are unstable? On the plus side, I agree that I fought Zig a _lot_ less than when I first started learning Rust. And I still fight Rust if anything involving generics and/or nontrivial annotations is involved.
exdsq 5y ago
> you spend your time tackling the original problem, not tackling the language. Would you say it's as good or better than Lisp?