Comment by deevus
1 month ago
I am currently contracted 3 days a week writing Zig. I can't say much because NDA, but I just love working with Zig almost every day. I think for the right projects, it is such a great choice for mission critical software.
You get the added benefit of being able to easily consume C libraries without much fuss. The fuss is in navigating the C APIs of decades old libraries that we all still depend on every day.
Do tell us sometime when you can in the future. It's always interesting to hear what Zig people are doing because they do some very weird stuff.
They wouldn't be using Zig otherwise. :)
In LuaJIT and Odin it is also easy to do FFI.
I write a fair bit of rust/c for my day job. Do you find zig easier than the ffi interface in Rust?
I maintain auto-generated Rust and Zig bindings for my C libraries (along with Odin-, Nim-, C3-, D- and Jai-bindings), and it's a difference like night and day (with Zig being near-perfect and Rust being near-worst-case - at least among the listed languages).
> Do you find zig easier than the ffi interface in Rust?
Yes, but it's mostly cultural.
Rust folks have a nasty habit of trying to "Rust-ify" bindings. And then proceed to only do the easy 80% of the job. So now you wind up debugging an incomplete set of bindings with strange abstractions and the wrapped library.
Zig folks suck in the header file and deal with the library as-is. That's less pretty, but it's also less complicated.
I've somehow avoided Rust, so I can only comment on what I see in the documentation.
In Zig, you can just import a C header. And as long as you have configured the source location in your `build.zig` file, off you go. Zig automatically generates bindings for you. Import the header and start coding.
This is all thanks to Zig's `translate-c` utility that is used under the hood.
Rust by contrast has a lot more steps required, including hand writing the function bindings.
You only hand-write function bindings in simple or well-constrained cases.
In general, the expectation is that you will use bindgen [0].
It's a very easy process:
1. Create a `build.rs` file in your Rust project, which defines pre-build actions. Use it to call bindgen on whatever headers you want to import, and optionally to define library linkage. This file is very simple and mainly boilerplate. [1]
2. Import your bindgen-generated Rust module... just use it. [2]
You can also skip step 1: bindgen is also a CLI tool, so if your C target is stable, you can just run bindgen once to generate the Rust interface module and move that right into your crate.
[0]: https://rust-lang.github.io/rust-bindgen/
[1]: https://rust-lang.github.io/rust-bindgen/tutorial-3.html
[2]: https://github.com/Charles-Schleich/Rust-Bindgen-Example/blo...
Zig is easier than Rust here, but you can auto generate bindings, you don’t have to write them by hand.