My Experience of building Bytebeat player in Zig

https://blog.karanjanthe.me/posts/zig-beat/

by KMJ-007 • 9 months ago

101 15 9 months ago

blog.karanjanthe.me

kragen• 9 months ago

I took a similar approach when I wrote a bytebeat player in CPython for a nightclub performance (https://github.com/kragen/pytebeat), but I used a shunting-yard parser rather than a Pratt parser.

diek• 9 months ago

From the description I thought the expression was a function of only 't', and there was no (for instance) accumulation of the previously computed byte. Then in the image I saw the same value of 't' evaluating to different values:

t=1000: 168 t=1000: 80

Reading the source: https://github.com/KMJ-007/zigbeat/blob/main/src/evaluator.z...

It does look like the expression is a pure function of 't', so I can only assume that's a typo.

ww520• 9 months ago

Arena Allocator is great, especially for periodic frame based allocations, e.g. rendering loop, game loop, request handling, etc. You just reset the arena at the end of every frame. It has the feature to reset and retain the memory allocated underneath. It's just a reset of the arena pointer.

bikeshaving• 9 months ago

I would love to see a blogpost about the advantages of different Zig allocators (page, arena, fixed buffer, more?) and practical use-cases. Right now, I’m just thinking “this is the thing I pass through all my functions,” and it’s usually just the std.heap.page_allocator. Imagine we get to a period where people are writing games, web UIs, servers directly in Zig. I think the way allocators are used is likely to be the most interesting part.

mitchellh• 9 months ago

The answer to this is not Zig specific (and predates Zig). I'm guessing good blog posts exist but I don't have a link handy, sorry. If not, I agree one should be written.

Don't sleep on the StackFallbackAllocator either, which will try to use a certain amount of stack space first, and only if it overflows that space will it fallback to another allocator (usually the heap but you can specify). This can speed up code a lot when the common case is small values with periodic very large values.

im3w1l3• 9 months ago

My thought when reading this, as someone who has never used zig, wouldn't it be easier with a global (thread local) variable? If you don't care you don't touch it. If you you do care you change it and restore it when you are done with whatever you were doing.

throwawaymaths• 9 months ago

please remember that the page allocator makes an expensive kernel call on each alloc/free call, so if allocation is frequent you may want at least a bump allocator on top. if you don't mind linking libc, for default use cases, c_allocator might be a better choice, as malloc is a quite battle tested general purpose allocator.

My Experience of building Bytebeat player in Zig

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