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Zig is hard but worth it

(ratfactor.com)
401 points signa11 | 4 comments | 01 Jun 23 10:44 UTC | HN request time: 0.743s | source
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jsheard ◴[01 Jun 23 12:51 UTC] No.36150389[source]▶
I get what Zig is going for in making all operations as explicit as possible, but I fear that it's going to turn away fields like graphics and game development where it would be a good fit except for the lack of operator overloading forcing you to go back to C-style math function spaghetti. It's all fun and games until what should be a straightforward math expression turns into 8 nested function calls.
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flohofwoe ◴[01 Jun 23 15:09 UTC] No.36152172[source]▶
Zig has a builtin @Vector type that might come in handy for most cases where in C++ a math library with operator overloading would be used:

https://www.godbolt.org/z/7zbxnncv6

...maybe one day there will also be a @Matrix builtin.

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throwawaymaths ◴[01 Jun 23 15:58 UTC] No.36153017[source]▶
Probably not. @Vector is not a mathematical vector, it's SIMD. it makes sense because there are times when those live in registers and a poly fill for stack memory isn't burdensome.

@Matrix makes less sense because when it gets big, where are you getting memory from?

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1. flohofwoe ◴[01 Jun 23 16:11 UTC] No.36153241[source]▶
For 'game-ey' math code, a matrix is at most 4x4 floats (64 bytes), that's fine for a value type that might live on the stack.

vec2..4 and matching matrix types up to 4x4 is basically also what's provided in GPU shading languages as primitive types, and personally I would prefer such a set of "SIMD-y" primitive types for Zig (maybe a bit more luxurious than @Vector, e.g. with things like component swizzling syntax - basically what this Clang extension offers: https://clang.llvm.org/docs/LanguageExtensions.html#vectors-...).

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2. cmbothwell ◴[01 Jun 23 17:34 UTC] No.36154544[source]▶
You might like Odin, it has a similar philosophy to Zig and supports swizzling:

https://odin-lang.org/docs/overview/#swizzle-operations

Matrix types are also built in:

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

I’ve thought for a little while that Odin could be a secret weapon for game dev and similar pieces of software.

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3. flohofwoe ◴[01 Jun 23 18:58 UTC] No.36155740[source]▶
I'm actually dabbling with Odin a bit in the scope of language bindings for the sokol headers:

https://github.com/floooh/sokol-odin

It's a very enjoyable language!

4. throwawaymaths ◴[02 Jun 23 01:09 UTC] No.36159575[source]▶
Sure, but people are going to want to use operator overloading for, e.g. dl/ml