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Writing a Wayland Compositor in Zig - Isaac Freund

Zig SHOWTIME4 HN recommenders · 2021–2021
26K views · talk · dated · Uploaded 2020-05-31

Isaac Freund, author of the River Wayland compositor, talks about writing a Wayland compositor in Zig. He covers why he chose Zig over C and Rust and how Zig can wrap a hairy C library.

HN recommends it as a phenomenal talk on Zig's C interop and on choosing between C, Rust and Zig for systems work.

C, C++, Rust, Go & systems languagesLinux & open-source ecosystems

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5 comments from Hacker News

@kristoff_it2021 · in “Should You Write a Wayland Compositor?”

Another Wayland compositor written in Zig is ifreund/river [1]. Isaac, the author, gave a talk on choosing C vs Rust vs Zig on Zig SHOWTIME a while back [2] and also has an upcoming talk at FOSDEM 21 [3] [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO] [3] [LINK]

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@DyslexicAtheist2021 · in “Should You Write a Wayland Compositor?”

this talk is phenomenal thank you. he explains (timestamp: [VIDEO] ) why he didn't go with Rust and it's quite puzzling what he says. I don't know enough about Rust if that's the case. To rephrase: "Rust was an obvious contender but it lacked good support for wlroots. there was a project which attempted to address this but they gave up after 12 months of work and 1000 commits. Rust's strong safety guarantees and memory management conflict with wlroots which assumes a longer lifetime of pointers. If you unplug your monitor with wlroots this pointer receives an event that means the output has disappeared and needs to be validated (see here [LINK] ).* This is strange because Rust positions itself as a system language so I'd have imagined these scenarios are all over the place and unsafe Rust would be the way most of this is solved?

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@jorangreef2021 · in “River – A dynamic tiling Wayland compositor”

The author of River has also done some fantastic talks, on Zig ShowTime [1] and at FOSDEM '21 [2]. [1] "Writing a Wayland Compositor in Zig" - [VIDEO] [2] "Zig: the perfect language for a Wayland Compositor?" - [LINK]

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@1_player2021 · in “Zig 0.9.0”

Congratulations! And welcome Isaac, I loved his Zig+Wayland screencast [1], where he explained very engagingly how Zig is able to embrace and extend a pretty hairy C library and make it more memory safe, without forcing the implementor to rewrite or painfully try to bend it to the strict or idiosyncratic rules of the language, as it may happen with Rust or even Go. I can't wait for 1.0! Or at least until the docs are a bit more accessible... :) 1: [VIDEO]

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@rmanolis2021 · in “My negative views on Rust”

Rust does not bind well with C for this reason it can not become a system level programming [LINK] However, there is another programming language that does not need bindings. It is called Zig and here it explains how it solves the same problem [VIDEO]

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