LLVM Emit Newsletter... ⚡ Zig SHOWTIME #21

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.

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At Zig SHOWTIME we dedicate ourselves to telling immersive stories, yet with every new season we set out to make the show bigger, more complex, deeply engaging. This new SHOWTIME season marries exploration of a vast open (source) world with energetic debates, story-changing side projects, and robust software development; all to bring you into our vision of today’s future.

Ok… enough monkeying around.

Welcome to a new year of Zig SHOWTIME!

You might have noticed that the tag line at the top describes Zig SHOWTIME not only as a show, but also as a community. The effort of expanding this endeavor to something more than just a show started by opening the Discord server, with the hope that it would make people want to work more on more projects, and maybe even collaborate on them, ultimately resulting in more talks for the show.

While the initial thinking was purely utilitarian, I want to step up and give to the community a more powerful direction; one that goes past my own show. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still out there hoping to get more speakers as time goes on, but for this season I’d like to work a few different angles to help makers tell their story with greater autonomy.

Last season we had a lot of speakers and weekly episodes. This cadence offered a few benefits, like the quick creation of a good catalog of videos for newcomers to watch, but it also had some downsides, like impacting my ability to think about format changes and affecting the overall production quality. I was barely able to keep up in the last few weeks before the break.

For this new season the show will have a monthly cadence. This will give me more time to do quality production work and it will also free some bandwidth for other members of the community to stream more Zig development!

In the last few months I’ve setup in Discord an announcement channel dedicated to Zig live streams, so that you could get notified whenever a member of the community went live. I plan to extend this system in the next few weeks to make it more robust and completely automated (at the moment I have to add new streams manually).

On top of that, I’ve also created bork, a TUI Twitch chat client capable of displaying emotes in the terminal (alongside other Twitch-specific features), a useful tool for streaming, already used by Matt Knight, KomariSpaghetti, and Andrew Kelley with great success (i.e. almost didn’t crash, displayed most emotes reasonably well, didn’t bork their terminals too much).

Here’s a short demo of what bork can do at the moment.

Here’s the list of Zig streamers I know about:

• https://twitch.tv/andrewrok
• https://twitch.tv/danbokser
• https://twitch.tv/daurnimator
• https://twitch.tv/fengb
• https://twitch.tv/komarispaghetti
• https://twitch.tv/kristoff_it
• https://twitch.tv/mattknite
• https://twitch.tv/nektro77
• https://twitch.tv/nypsiee
• https://twitch.tv/spex_guy
• https://www.youtube.com/c/Iridescence

If you’re interested in streaming (or already are and we just don’t know about it), drop us a line in Discord!

I’m looking forward to seeing more Zig projects and streamers this year. Zig is slowly but surely taking over the progamming world and it’s good time to start enjoying the perks of being early adopters. On my part, I’m working on making it easier to get started, get noticed by the public, and make friends with other makers. I’ll expand more on that soon.

In the meantime, I do still need talks! Please do apply if you have a project you want to show, or to explain a concept that you think wold be useful for others to know.

Upcoming Events

Psst, the Zig SHOWTIME calendar (linked at the beginning of this letter), also includes reminders for these events.

FOSDEM 21

Saturday 6th of February (Tomorrow!)

We have a half-day track at this year’s FOSDEM! Join xq, ifreund, and kubkon to learn more about cool things that can be done with Zig. Check out the link for the complete schedule and more info on each individual talk.

Loris Cro & Zig: Building Up Systems Programming

Monday 15th of February

If you remember, a while ago Abner interviewed Andrew alongside GingerBill and Josh Huelsman (creator of Jiyu) in a podcast episode titled The Race to Replace C and C++.

In this new episode Abner and I discuss what it means to build a community around software, some of the human problems involved, and how that relates to other phenomena in our industry. The podcast episode will premiere on Abner’s Twitch channel.

This event is an off season special of Handmade Seattle.

New Episode

2021: Year of the Linux Gaming Desktop

By Andrew Kelley

Andrew has a dream. A statically linked dream, where videogames can be built and distributed for Linux as distro-agnostic executables.

Gaben, put down Half Life Alyx Episode 2, you might want to watch this.

Zig Roadmap Sync

Since Andew is here, let’s take a quick moment to go through the current roadmap and have him answer some questions from the public!

Fair warning: I reserve the right to filter out requests about dabbing & co., let’s try to make this session on-point and informative.

See you at showtime,
Loris Cro