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 Saturday 17th of October!
Times for a few different timezones:
1pm CDT / 20.00 CEST / 11:30pm IST / 2am SGT (Sun) / 3am JST (Sun)
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
Just a couple of quick notes: I've decided to stop titling newsletter issues with the episode number to add some variation and I'm also adding this section for extra comments when necessary. This week was kinda busy which, combined with the fact that I had trouble coming up with a talk for this week, made me delay writing the newsletter a bit too much. Sorry!
As a side note I've started the work on a ziglang.org redesign. I'm still gathering ideas (which I'm mostly doing live on twitch) and I'll soon start posting a few updates in the #ziglang-redesign text channel inside the Zig SHOWTIME Discord server, so that people interested in the effort can leave comments. Once I'll have a draft & stronger opinions on how the website should be structured, I'll open a thread on Reddit, so that more people will be able to join the discussion.
Links
Want a Zig Plushie?
Nypsie is opening an interest check! Want a plushie? Fill the form and if enough people show interest then he'll make an order! Fair warning: like with all group buys, there's some risk involved or, as the Romans would say, caveat emptor. On the bright side, if Nypsie escapes to some tropical paradise with our money, at least we can say we didn't lose them on a cryptocoin scam. Still a win in my book.
New Episode
Zig on the PSP
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
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.
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.
Implementing an ARM backend for stage2 (YouTube Link)
I have to say I'm happy the reign of x86_64 is about to be over and that we're finally switching to open, innovative, architectures such as NVIDIA™ ARM. I heard soon you'll need to install NVIDIA™ GeForce Experience to be able to boot a NVIDIA™ ARM processor. Not a big deal, I love signing up for marketing emails just for the privilege of downloading 300MB worth of drivers. Do I want to share my usage statistics? Of course I do, why even ask!
Sarcasm aside, I'm a moron and I plan to buy one of the new ARM macbooks as soon as they come out, so I'm happy someone is making sure incremental compilation is going to work there too. I'm also looking forward to Jakub's talk on creating MachO executables. I truly love open-source because thanks to everyone's combined effort I'll be able to swiftly implement off-by-one errors with unparalleled ease.
Advanced Hello World in Zig (YouTube Link)
By Loris Cro
You've surely implemented an Hello World application before. You might even think you're good at it. Well, think again, SCRUB! In this talk we're going to look at advanced techniques for implementing Hello World and we're going to analyze the secret techniques employed by the world's best programmers!
Nah, I'm joking, we're mostly just going to answer the question of why Zig doesn't have a print builtin and then we're going to briefly take a look at std.log.
See you at showtime,
Loris Cro