After porting my CHIP-8 emulator to Zig (repo on GitHub) and writing about it, I decided to come back for some fun and wanted to try my hand on building a small game from the ground up.
| Sometimes you win | Sometimes you lose |
|---|---|
 |  |
Sweeping the mines
Here’s a few pain points I noticed coming back to Zig for the second time:
- Pointers: Zig has several pointer types, and it can be confusing sometimes when choosing. You’ll get back to the docs a few times before getting this right.
- Initialization rules: Coming from C++, Zig has quite a different philosophy around variable initialization and the syntax for it. Don’t expect to write
var = {}to get a zero-initialized variable! - If you want something mutable, get a pointer on it! I bumped my head against this a few times, because I expected things like
var my_var = array[x]to hold a reference by default. Nope. Get a pointer instead! What’s weird here is that the syntax after initialization can stay the same for both variants, so be careful!
On the bright side
Writing Zig is still a nice experience overall, I especially like the smooth integration of array slices and the ability to get an loop counter super easily.
I used SDL2 for this project again, and there’s no surprise - the C-interop is smooth as butter, no fiddling around with wrappers and minimal syntax overhead.
Play the thing
As usual, here’s the code on GitHub.