Oct. 23, 2020, 6:22 a.m.
Harvesting MachO Energy on macOS (that's a funny Final Fantasy reference, hand over your laughs now)
Zig SHOWTIME
The Zig SHOWTIME Discord server
is now open for business!
JOIN NOW!
(From the Community Wiki Page)The Zig SHOWTIME Discord server serves as a coordination tool for organizing the show, and as a place where people invested in the success of Zig can socialize and collaborate together on new projects. The main goal of this space is to create a community of creators (be it code, blogs, videos, or undefined), so that we can all make the most out of our Zig experience. Nobody is born knowing Zig so everyone is welcome to have fun in this server but, if you're unsure whether Zig is the right language for you, I recommend checking out first other Zig communities as they might be more focused on helping newcomers to the language.
The next episode of Zig SHOWTIME airs on Sunday 25th of October!
Times for a few different timezones:
3pm CDT / 22.00 CEST / 1:30am IST (Mon) / 4am SGT (Mon) / 3am JST (Mon)
Go to https://zig.show for more info or subscribe to the Zig SHOWTIME calendar (iCal) to have all episodes automatically added to your calendar.
Padding
The work for the ziglang.org redesign continues. I’ve identified Hugo as a reasonable choice to implement static site generation (that said, I’m looking forward to a pure Zig alternative in the future ;) and I’m working on porting the current site to it. Soon I’ll setup a process to contribute translations and in parallel start designing the new version, which will reuse most of the current material. Join one of my live streams if you want to check on how things are going.
Links
Want a Zig Plushie?
The interest check form for organizing a plushie group buy is still open. It’s non-binding, so don’t be afraid of showing interest :)
Making BPF easy with libbpf and Zig
Matt Knight wrote for his company’s technical blog a post about the quality of life improvements that Zig brings to developing with BPF, the Linux subsystem & x86_64 bytecode dialect that can do a lot of things, but that for some reason is named after only one functionality of the many: filtering packets (the acronym stands for Berkeley Packet Filter).
The LoLa Programming Language
If you missed xq’s talk, check out this scripting language designed for embedding in external systems like videogames!
zpm - Zig Package Repository
Directly from xq’s words: > ZPM is a community-driven package repository for all ziguanas out there. > > Find your favourite library or add it to the repo. Contribute now!
Related Links:
mattnite/zkg
Directly from Matt Knight’s words:
> Zkg (cli package manager) has the zpm api integrated, so now you’re just a zkg add <name> away from getting your hands on some fresh apple_pie! (Note: Linux and Mac are building nicely, but I’m having troubles with windows if anyone wants to contribute)
New Episode
Introduction to MachO linking in Zig
By Jakub Konka
After Joachim’s talk on the self-hosted backend for ARM, we have another talk that stems from the work being done on the self-hosted compiler. This time it’s Jakub who took a break from working on WASI and decided instead to learn how executables are linked on macOS. I guess he got bored of dealing with open standards and always having documentation at his disposal, and instead decided to try his hand at thinking different. I’m sure noting went wrong… right?
Reading Zig’s Standard Library
By Loris Cro
Who the hell needs docs anyway? Well I do, but in the meantime we need to make do with what we have and it’s actually not that bad to read the standard library’s source code. In this talk I’ll walk us through a few notable examples. Once you start being able to orient yourself in the standard library, everything becomes much easier.
I bet Google watched a similar talk from Sun right before starting the development of Android. Little did Google know though that it was all according to Oracle’s keikaku!
Last Episode
Here’s a recap of the talks in the last episode, in case you missed it. The full episode is available on YouTube.
Zig on the PSP (YouTube Link)
By Nathan “Iridescence” Bourgeois
Come closer children, let me tell you a story of times past. Once upon a time it was harder to make portable consoles and the only one kids wanted for Christmas was one made by Nintendo. No it wasn’t a DS, but one the one that came before it, and it was called Game Boy. One day the elves at Sony decided that it wasn’t fair that all the market share was hoarded by Nintendo: they too received many letters from their shareholders, asking for dividends as a gift! So they set out and created their own portable console, called PSP, here look at this picture of it, isn’t it beautiful? No Jessica, it’s not a Switch, and no little Timmy, it can’t run Fortnite… hey where are you all going, come back here you little shits!
Answers to Common Newbie Questions (YouTube Link)
By Loris Cro
With the talks that I’ve been giving recently, I tried to make the presentation start with something aimed at newcomers and then continue with something interesting also for people already familiar with Zig. Turns out that cranking out talks like this on a regular basis is not that easy, so in this case I’m going a bit “meta” and the whole talk is about problems that newcomers encounter and the idea is that experienced people might want to watch it so they can better understand what others might find confusing. Hopefully this talk will help lower the amount of “what is pointer” questions from new people, and at the same time lower the amount of “what part of how type inference interacts with comptime lazyness inside the special evaluation process of built-in functions do you not understand?” follow-up questions by veterans.
See you at showtime,
Loris Cro