Reflecting on a Year of Gamedev in Zig

https://bgthompson.codeberg.page/blog/one-year-zig-gamedev-reflections/

by bgthompson • 1 year ago

118 121 1 year ago

bgthompson.codeberg.page

Zambyte2• 1 year ago

Not sure why this was flagged. It was an interesting read, thanks for sharing. My biggest concern with using Zig has been the breaking changes that you mentioned, but I have been pushing forward with it for personal projects because it just seems like people are able to work around them easily, like you mentioned.

bgthompson4• 1 year ago

You're welcome! My experience with the breaking changes in Zig has not been bad at all. For brevity in the blog I didn't get into what I had to do to get things working again, but the process itself was straightforwards. Sometimes the names of some standard library functions had changed, sometimes it was some extra fields in the build system. Whatever the case, the changes were almost always documented in the release notes anyway, so after reading the release notes I basically knew the (small) amount of work I had ahead of me.

thunkingdeep• 1 year ago

All posts not fellating Rust are eventually flagged here. It’s not really a neutral venue for more academic conversations about PLT.

einpoklum• 1 year ago

I would assume, that when developing a game alone, you would depend a lot on libraries other have written. Is the Zig ecosystem rich enough in this respect, at this point?

dragonelite2• 1 year ago

You can easily integrate any C library, so pretty much all the important stuff is available. You also have Zig-gamedev repo where you have community written zig wrappers for those c libraries.

59nadir• 1 year ago

I would assume, that when developing a game alone, you would depend a lot on libraries other have written.

The guts of a game engine don't require any libraries at all. Using licensed offerings like havok for physics, etc., I don't think the language-specific part you might write (bindings, etc.) is a meaningful part of integrating the offering, and since they're licensed it's not as if you could just add them willy nilly in C++. You could argue that you'd want a language-specific library for some Steam SDK stuff, but AFAIK both Odin and Zig do have bindings for at least some important parts of these, and even if they didn't I don't think FFI is really that big of a problem in either language.

If you use Odin everything you need in order to create a game engine is shipped with it via the standard library (`math:linalg`, etc.) and vendor libraries (`vendor:{OpenGL,directx/direct3d11,directx/direct3d12,wgpu}`, etc.). If you really do want to use libraries `raylib` is also included, as well as SDL.

Keyframe• 1 year ago

C interoperability is the name of the game with Zig, however there is a chance of reading article like "Moving away from Zig" in the future like we're seeing with Rust. At one point in time you have to decide whether you want to write a game or tinker with tech and engines. Both is absolutely fine, of course and most of us "get it", but it also depends on personal skills and pain and time threshold.

flohofwoe2• 1 year ago

The Zig compiler can compile C, C++ and ObjC, directly import C headers, directly call into C APIs and the Zig type system is very "C ABI friendly". So if something isn't available in pure Zig it's quite trivial to directly integrate dependencies that are written in C, C++ or ObjC (much easier than any other language I used so far).

There's also a centralized effort to wrap C/C++ libraries into Zig packages so that they can be easily consumed in the Zig build system:

https://github.com/allyourcodebase

bgthompson4• 1 year ago

Ultimately, this will be determined by the scope of the project, and depends on whether you count using an existing C library as part of the Zig ecosystem.

If you want Zig libraries that don't call any C/C++ code whatsoever, then you're going to have a hard time (as of 2025). There's not, e.g, something as mature and tested as glfw in pure Zig. There is work being done to make pure Zig libraries for gamedev however, see for example Mach: https://machengine.org/

If you're happy to use C libraries though (as I am), then things are generally fine. Many of the most popular gamedev C/C++ libraries have already had their build systems converted into Zig (e.g. Raylib) and so can easily be added to a project without having to do any work in the build system.

For C libraries that aren't already packaged, or if you want to maintain full control of the build yourself, packaging libraries with the Zig build system isn't too bad, but it's still a lot of work. (E.g. Ghostty maintains its own build files for its packages; as a result there is a lot of Ghostty build system code: https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/tree/main/pkg )

rob742• 1 year ago

The Zig Discord is a great resource for anyone learning Zig. At any given time, the zig-help forum is awash with questions from beginners like “How do you make for loop in reverse? or “What allocator to use in WASM?” Most get answered within minutes.

Am I the only one who feels this is a step back from platforms such as Stack Overflow? Discord is basically just a chat platform, and while it's nice that there are always people there who are willing to answer the same questions over and over again, you can't rely on that staying the same in the future. Whereas SO crowdsourced a "canonical" answer to a question, and if someone came up with the same question later (and didn't find the existing answer via the search function or Google), they could be pointed to that answer.

dragonelite2• 1 year ago

I agree i rather see all this discussion etc take place on dedicated forums or other text based options so search engines can index the stuff..

interpol_p2• 1 year ago

Totally agree

But once we opened a Discord for our product we had so many more questions and users coming in. I do not like that it is locked up on a proprietary platform organised as a chat interface, but damn is it popular and often-used. Having users communicate with us more regularly is very motivating, and we've had so much more quality feedback by having it available

It is, unfortunately, where a lot of the people are and it makes your user base feel very "alive"

jjani• 1 year ago

Why not use AnswerOverflow to make the chats indexed and searchable? It's definitely a lot better than nothing, multiple times it has already helped me find answers to questions I had.

sebtron• 1 year ago

I agree, Discord is a terrible user experience for me. The UI is confusing and any piece of information older than a few hours disappears forever into the void.

bmacho• 1 year ago

Am I the only one who feels this is a step back from platforms such as Stack Overflow?

I have a long-held belief that the single best community information database format is Stack Overflow. (As opposed to wiki, chats, user groups/mailing lists, flat/threaded forums.) An editable top-level question, answered by several editable top level answers with different weighting on different things. (And then chat or small comments, there should be a place for some busywork that should carry no relevant information ideally.) Not necessary the website, but the format.

The second is blogosphere, allow users to write articles and engage in comments. For some reason basically no communities have these. They tend to have discord, and maybe a wiki.

rembicilious• 1 year ago

I don’t really think chat is a step back (discord may be a step back vs irc or I am just graying). Learning newish tech in chat has always been way more engaging for me than wiki or forum style communication.

IME chat attracts people who devote a lot of energy to the topic, including top contributors and power users. If you have questions about the latest features or obscure use cases there isn’t a better place to go.

Forum and wiki are great formats too, with different strengths. But if you are frustrated because you can’t seem to find help in those formats, head for the chat.

Some communities archive their chat. This seems like a great source of data to bootstrap a wiki or faq.

troupo3• 1 year ago

forum is awash with questions from beginners like “How do you make for loop in reverse? or “What allocator to use in WASM?” Most get answered within minutes.

You wouldn't get a chat awash with these questions if they could be easily searched for.

tobyhinloopen2• 1 year ago

SO is a very beginner-unfriendly platform. Every time I used it, I either did not get any replies or had my question altered, deleted, removed, closed etc. I have no clue why anyone still uses it.

robertlagrant• 1 year ago

The two options are: 1) no one has had their questions answered on stack overflow, or 2) your questions were duplicates or needed a lot of rewording to make them useful to people in the future.

QuadmasterXLII• 1 year ago

Asking a question on stackoverflow that is long term useful to the community isn’t a beginner-difficulty task.

rkangel2• 1 year ago

Yes, this is an unfortunate direction that SO took in the last 5 or so years. In the first 5-10 years of its life it was much more welcoming and a great resource. Now it feels like a static database of (potentially slightly out of date) FAQs.

Buttons8404• 1 year ago

My 10 year old question was closed as a duplicate of a 7 year old question. I'm still both bitter and amused by this. (This was a few years ago, but it's still closed.)

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10181706/working-with-a-...

Night_Thastus• 1 year ago

It's very hostile. Sometimes I just want to ask a broader, conceptual question. I don't need someone to produce working code. Just discuss.

Sometimes I can't make a working minimal example because I work with info that can't be placed online and writing something ground up that is similar enough and decoupled from the hundreds of files and hundreds of thousands of lines would take me a week or two and may not end up even working out.

emrah• 1 year ago

Not that it matters as much any more since SO is slowly dying, they should replace human moderates with AI and involve humans only when AI says it needs help with something

bsder3• 1 year ago

Ziggit is a Zig Discourse that is pretty good: https://ziggit.dev/

It's almost as fast as the Discord and much friendlier to searching and context.

I make a point of avoiding the Discord simply because I want my questions and answers to be searchable by people who come afterward.

cassepipe• 1 year ago

Except discourse is just a forum and thus less useful than the SO format where good answers bubble up

kristoff_it5• 1 year ago

Ziggit is indeed another active community and it's perfectly legitimate to want to stick to a platform vs another for personal preference, the people who downvoted this comment should really re-evaluate the way the approach this subject.

charlie-83• 1 year ago

I always found SO really slow. Often I would get stuck on something, ask a question and then have to wait an hour for a response (which would often become a back and forth of comments with large periods of time between them). Even on discords for less popular languages/libraries you generally get an answer in minutes.

I think this is likely due to the incentives SO creates. I have never actually answered a SO question because it feels like you need to answer perfectly or get torn apart. I will often contribute to a discord question even if I don't full know the answer just because I think I can add something useful.

lelanthran• 1 year ago

Even on discords for less popular languages/libraries you generally get an answer in minutes.

On SO, at its peak, you got an answer even faster because it was public (i.e. the answer was already there, you just searched for your question).

So you're comparing minutes to instant.

Lyngbakr• 1 year ago

    > I have never actually answered a SO question because it feels like you need to answer perfectly or get torn apart.

IME, this is heavily dependent on the language and, therefore, the subcommunity. For example, for Clojure and R I've found the SO communities to typically be kind and positive, whereas I've found the JS folks there to be dismissive and aggressive, but YMMV.

karel-3d• 1 year ago

You can still ask your Zig question on Stack Overflow, or they have a semi-official Discourse forum Ziggit (which I find preferable to Discord) where I got answers quickly...

Zig Discord is also just semi-official... there is also Slack, there is also mailing list, libera IRC, Telegram, QQ, Zulip...

https://github.com/ziglang/zig/wiki/Community

koakuma-chan• 1 year ago

Zig Discord is also just semi-official

Is the Zig creator not there? I'm pretty sure he is.

rkangel2• 1 year ago

I agree, but I think that you could get a useful middle ground by continuously publishing the contents of your Q&A Discord channel to the internet (in a way where it gets indexed by search engines).

Yes, Stack Overflow collated these questions and answers better but then at least you could google for something and get the answer, rather than asking again.

gyomu• 1 year ago

Agreed - humans like participating in chats better (when you have a problem, you want live humans ready to answer you now), but the SO style archive is better for long term archiving & retrievability.

A LLM product that turns Discord transcripts into a browsable Q&A archive would be neat.

Klonoar2• 1 year ago

There are already several projects that have tried the “expose Discord data for indexing” model. Problem is no chat servers ever actually use them, perhaps because they’re at odds with expectations of people in the servers themselves.

krapp• 1 year ago

In a world where every surface of the web is infested with bots, trolls, spammers and AI slop, persistent static and public information is a hazard. Moving knowledge to ephemeral communities is an immune response to what the web has become. I'm usually not a fan of gatekeeping but doing so to filter for human beings seems like a necessary evil.

kristoff_it5• 1 year ago

Discord is just one of many places where you can get help from other Zig community members.

Over time I've seen plenty of comments like this one about platform A vs platform B and I find them all absolutely uninteresting. Having an active Discord server doesn't stop you from having active communities elsewhere.

Some people prefer Discord and they made a comfortable home for themselves. If you prefer a different platform (which could be a matter of personal preference or an objective advantage, it really doesn't matter which it is), then go make yourself a comfortable home there and start offering help to others on it.

If you're a newcomer and can't really offer much help, then you're asking for people who do have that knowledge to help you on a platform of your choice. That's certainly something you can wish for, but you can't demand it, regardless of how much objectively better your platform might be.

thunky2• 1 year ago

Having an active Discord server doesn't stop you from having active communities elsewhere.

It actually does when users are pointed to discord to ask the same questions over and over.

Look at the two example questions in OP's quote. Sending users to discord for those means nearly nobody else will benefit from the answers.

And I think it's fair to point this out.

Zambyte2• 1 year ago

In the context of Zig, Ziggit has been pretty nice also. I use that instead.

zamalek• 1 year ago

I previously worked at a fintech and they, understandably so given the domain, blocked Discord. Think for a second what wonders that does for participating in open source (which the same employer had no problem with).

Discord is not a suitable platform for developers. I think Matrix is pretty good but, fuck it, I'll take IRC over Discord - it's still perfectly functional.

Buttons8404• 1 year ago

Discord is really bad if you want more than 1-on-1 real-time communication with other humans. This is also its primary advantage.

drob518• 1 year ago

Discord sucks. Slack is so much better, IMO.

TUSF• 1 year ago

I don't think SO's "canonical answer" concept really jives with a pre-1.0 language like Zig that is still in constant flux, regularly making breaking changes. One of the questions the blog brings up as an example, "What allocator to use in WASM?" would have a different answer last year than it would this year, and may well have a different answer next year.

belst• 1 year ago

Discord (Chat in general) is really nice if you are the first to have a problem.

If anyone else has the same problem, they can't find it by just googling tho. So they need to ask the same question again which gets annoying pretty fast unfortunately

amoss2• 1 year ago

On point 4, I don't use zig but a two second google leads to http://ratfactor.com/zig/stdlib-browseable2/math/atan.zig.ht...

I wonder about the accuracy of the rest of the article.

bsder3• 1 year ago

The issue is that atan wasn't implemented for a comptime float.

A "comptime f32" is different from an "f32"

jamiejquinn3• 1 year ago

If you don't use zig, you might have missed why that error indicates a stdlib bug. The error in the article is down to a quirk of the type system where literals (like the literal float) have their own unique type (comptime_float) that can coerce to related types (f32, f64) but in this particular case, when atan switches on the type, it doesn't explicitly include comptime_float and fails. Seems like an oversight in the stdlib to me.

amoss2• 1 year ago

Missed all of that, thanks for the explanation. Why doesn't zig try and apply the coercion before the type switch - is this deliberate for safety?

Ygg23• 1 year ago

Not gonna lie, most of those things look like negatives.

- Zig main source of QnA is a black box (Discord)? One that might be soon enshittified to hell because we have to satisfy the IPO.

- Zig uses Gradle style approach to Maven. Having used Gradle, I honestly can't recommend it. Too much freedom in build pipeline leads to too many footguns.

- Zig changes in big exciting ways, sounds like euphemism for breaking changes. Having those on framework level is tiring, having those on language level is hell.

flohofwoe2• 1 year ago

Zig main source of QnA is a black box (Discord)?

The Discord is quite okay-ish for getting a quick answer for things you're blocked on. For proper discussions and deeper questions, Ziggit is a better choice (which is also a 'proper' forum):

https://ziggit.dev/latest

Zig uses Gradle style approach to Maven.

Zig's build system is conceptionally further away from both Gradle and Maven than Gradle is different from Maven (having to wrestle with both from time to time, my personal opinion is: both are a huge pile of excrement, unfit for real-world usage - even cmake is better than what the Java world accepts as build systems, and that's some achievement ;)

At least the Zig build system looks promising in the way that simple things are simple and complex things are possible, even though the API still sometimes doesn't quite know if it wants to be imperative or declarative. But the basic idea is that the Zig build system and package manager are "just" part of the regular stdlib and that your build process is a regular Zig program that gets compiled and then executed to perform the build.

Zig changes in big exciting ways, sounds like euphemism for breaking changes

...which is completely expected of a pre-1.0 status. OTH, the last couple of versions were not worse than fixing new warnings after a minor C/C++ compiler update.

Ygg23• 1 year ago

...which is completely expected of a pre-1.0 status.

I fully agree, but I assume you want to ship your game (i.e. its a game not a toy). At least to Windows. Building your game on pre 1.0 language is like building a house on sand that's being transported by a truck.

dns_snek• 1 year ago

1. I agree

2. I guess this is a matter of perspective. I don't have strong opinions on build systems but as someone who only occasionally dabbles in systems programming, I know that Zig's build system is infinitely more approachable and coherent than the monstrosities of CMake and any other build system I've ever come across in various C and C++ projects.

3. That's true, but Zig isn't 1.0 yet so that's to be expected.

Ygg23• 1 year ago

I don't have strong opinions on build systems but as someone who only occasionally dabbles in systems programming, I know that Zig's build system is infinitely more approachable and coherent than the monstrosities of CMake and any other build system I've ever come across in various C and C++ projects.

Whenever a language builds their own build system in a programming language or a DSL, the issue of composability rears its ugly head. Yeah, it's a bit better to write Zig build in Zig than Bash, or some Groovy DSL.

What it doesn't change that it's hard to compose them. Do you want to add code coverage? Well, you now need to figure out where to add code coverage in your custom build script. Rather than a linear set of steps, you have a tangle of unique "solutions" rather than a standard way to extend the process.

jamiejquinn3• 1 year ago

Snap! I've been developing a roguelike in zig for nearly exactly a year and my experience is very similar. I especially appreciate your mentioning the positives that come with breaking changes.

Seems like you're also a C/C++ developer so I'm curious: how have you found zig's comptime compares to templates? (Personally I've found it a refreshingly simple experience, if occasionally annoying due to pre-1.0 bugs)

bgthompson4• 1 year ago

For my (relatively simple) use cases, I've had a significantly better time using comptime than templates; the syntax and the quality of the error messages are a lot simpler in Zig. While I've never attempted to do anything super fancy with templates in C/C++, my gut feeling is that comptime can provide most, if not all, of functionality that templates provide. (But C/C++ template experts please chime in if this is not the case.)

jvanderbot5• 1 year ago

Former Cpp dev here. If I never have to debug a template barf it'll be too soon. By the end of my time in C/Cpp land I'd written more C than anything, with occasional "structs with con/de-structors". Happily the next gen of systems languages fit about in that niche already!

andreldm• 1 year ago

I think point 3 is completely off. That's not cherry-picking, that's comparing apples to oranges, those generated Makefiles are not meant to be readable, if you want to compare, look at configure.ac and Makefile.am. I also dislike CMake, but just saying it sucks is poor argumentation. Finally, in the title Ninja and Meson are mentioned, just to be completely ignored. I'm having a great experience with Meson, I would like to learn how the Zig build system is better than it, this piece unfortunately does not provide that.

tuetuopay3• 1 year ago

I would go even further: showing the generated cmake file is like showing the disassembly from the zig snippet shown.

I still think the point stands though: zig's build system is nicer. Still bad IMHO as I despise build systems where you describe the build in the same language. Most of the time, it's much better to have a declarative rather than imperative build system. All in all, Ninja/Meson/Cargo/etc are much better in this regard.

(and yes, I think build.rs was a mistake, a necessary evil. Definitely not a feature)

jvanderbot5• 1 year ago

I have never once had to make a build.rs file, except to make python bindings for some of my own rust libraries. Are people out here using build.rs for everyday driving?

IshKebab4• 1 year ago

After compiling the game with the flag -Dcpu=baseline, the binary contained only x86-64-v1 instructions, allowing my friend to play the game.

Feels like the startup code should actually verify that it's running on a suitable CPU rather than just crashing.

I don't think C/C++ or Rust do this either but they should!

tuetuopay3• 1 year ago

pretty much no language do this by default. however, most languages target the -v1 instruction set in 'release' or optimized mode. (e.g. Rust does this, and AFAIK GCC and clang both do this for C/C++)

IshKebab4• 1 year ago

I tried Zig a bit and found it quite nice, but it is very low level. Like in Rust you concatenate strings like this:

  let result = format!("{a}{b}{c}");

In Zig it's something like this:

  const allocator = std.heap.page_allocator;
  const parts = [_][]const u8{"a", "b"};
  const result = std.mem.concat(allocator, &parts[0], 2) catch @panic("allocation failure");
  defer allocator.free(result);

I dunno if I want to write any really significant programs like that. At least not any that use strings a lot!

MawKKe• 1 year ago

There's also `std.fmt.allocPrint()` which functions similarly to `format!()`. Although I'd argue its rather poorly named, like many of the functions in the stdlib...

For wanting to avoid fiddling with multiple repeated alloc/defer-free, it's often convenient to use the arena allocators that allow you to release everything with a single `defer arena.deinit()`

unwind• 1 year ago

I would (coming from a C background) guess that `allocPrint()` owes its name from the C standard library function(s) `as(n)printf()`[1]. At least that would make sense, the naming is modernized by being made longer, to gain clarity.

[1] https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man3/asprintf.3.html

bgthompson4• 1 year ago

My game has a bunch of strings, and my string code currently looks very different to this! For example, copying two lines from source:

  var buffer : [64] u8 = undefined;
  const level_name_cstring : stringnt = std.fmt.bufPrintZ(&buffer, "{}. {s}", .{icon_index + 1, level_name}) catch unreachable;

(Make the string "10. Fortress" from the int 10 and "Fortress")

The reason is, most of the strings in my game are bounded, and actually, known ahead of time. None of the levels have names that approach anything as long as 64 bytes, so I can actually do a fair bit of string manipulation on the stack before needing to use / save it to an allocator. (At least for now before localization XD)

So it depends on the use case. Sure, string manipulation in general can be tiresome in Zig, but in many cases it's also simple.

IshKebab4• 1 year ago

Isn't `unreachable` in Zig like in C? So very bad things can happen if you overflow.

This sort of code makes me nervous about Zig.

sgt• 1 year ago

Zig is really HN's new love story, isn't it. Or quickly becoming...

Rust is still popular but it turns out the developer joy is pretty low.

ultimaweapon• 1 year ago

Rust is still popular but it turns out the developer joy is pretty low.

Rust is one of the language I enjoy to use. The problem is you need to overcome its steep learning curve in order to enjoy it, which people tend to give up because it is too hard.

jvanderbot5• 1 year ago

Which to me is fine. It's not a great hobby language but it is a fantastic professional language, precisely because of the ease of refactors and speed of development that comes with the type system and borrow checker.

christophilus• 1 year ago

For me, it wasn’t the learning curve that was the problem with Rust. It’s the compilation time. It’s just so slow. I’m used to OCaml, Go, and Typescript (via Bun or esbuild) with iteration times in the tens-to-low-hundreds of milliseconds. Zig still feels a wee bit slow, but it’s acceptable. Rust? It makes me want to toss my laptop into the fire.

To be honest, I haven’t touched Rust in years, so it may have improved.

WD-42• 1 year ago

I’ve been dabbling in OS development. I started with rust and it was… ok. Lots of what you’d expect: unsafe all over the place, weird borrow checker work arounds. It felt like I was bending the languages arm.

I recently started to re implement the (admittedly very basic) kernel in Zig and it’s been a breath of fresh air. The language seems much better suited for the level of abstraction that Osdev lives at. Major bonus is that all the existing C code is directly useable in a zig project without any wrapper nonsense or it can be easily translated.

I think I’ll stick with dig for a bit.

Buttons8404• 1 year ago

"Joy" is always highest for new languages, because there are only green fields and enthusiasts. "Joy" is also increased by languages that let you just do what you want, like dynamic typing, or other language features that delay seeing that first error.

pcwalton8• 1 year ago

This is a good point. Zig is practically optimized for this: comptime is extremely dynamically typed compared to actual generics, and the lack of memory safety is often "a breath of fresh air"--until you have to actually fix bugs (including security bugs) resulting from it.

Klonoar2• 1 year ago

If you’re only looking at HN, sure.

The programming world is much larger than this small slice of the internet, though. HN has had several eras of “this is the hot new fad language and you should use it!”, going as far back as Lisp in the mid-2000s.

It will likely continue to experience this cycle until the heat death of the universe.

pcwalton8• 1 year ago

Rust is still popular but it turns out the developer joy is pretty low.

I mean, Rust keeps winning the "most loved" language contest on GitHub, so it seems someone likes it.

rc003• 1 year ago

https://github.blog/news-insights/octoverse/octoverse-2024/#...

What are you talking about?

Bolwin• 1 year ago

I think you're talking about stackoverflow not github

Majora320• 1 year ago

I think base Rust is a great language, but the ecosystem tends towards very complex and overengineered solutions; with advanced uses/abuses of macros and the type system, trait hell ends up being not too dissimilar to template hell from C++. And the async/await story is plagued with layers and layers of complexity due to the many obtuse interactions with its lifetime system. Rust honestly probably should've gone with its original idea of green threads/channels, like GC-less Go, but that idea was dropped a long time ago.

jvanderbot5• 1 year ago

First class SIMD vector support is awesome. The complaint about that not being first class matrix support kind of misses the mark: it's all vectors all the way down.

This is one glaring omission from Rust. Their SIMD integration is library specific and patchwork but improving.

lerno• 1 year ago

Out of C3, Odin and Zig, Zig is actually the language with the worst SIMD support. Odin has SIMD vectors, array programming and built in matrix types while C3 has built in SIMD vector types and operator overloading for userland numerical types such as matrix and complex types.

Odin and C3 has things like swizzling, assigning a scalar to all elements etc out of the box, whereas Zig is similar to C and just provides compiler builtins. Compare `vec * @splat(foo())` (Zig) to `vec * foo()` (Odin/C3).

johnisgood• 1 year ago

Yeah I dislike Zig for all those "@()" stuff.

CollinEMac• 1 year ago

2. Zig has good builtin support for vectors, but not for matrices.

Oh boy do I have the language for you.

https://odin-lang.org/docs/overview/#matrix-type

n_jd• 1 year ago

If you poke around you will find the author is already familiar with Odin. Might be interesting to hear why they moved to Zig.

Reflecting on a Year of Gamedev in Zig

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