Tracking Issue: Priorities of Real World Zig Users

[andrewrk]

This issue is a reminder to go look at Third Party Tracking Issues (what is important to other people?) and browse through third party tracking issues to learn what things are affecting real world users of Zig. That link is on the Zig wiki and is freely editable. Please feel free to add your projects to the list there and share your troubles.

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Additionally, I will list some actionable issues that are already in the Zig issue tracker:

• Get pacman.zig on the Package Manager #16711
• Get Ghostty on the Zig Package Manager #16672

[jcollie]

There needs to be more examples in the documentation, especially in the standard library reference. Sure, there's lots of Zig code out there to look at, but it's typically in larger Zig projects and those can be hard to digest, especially for someone new to the language.

[He-Pin]

Can we use it with Clion？

[xdBronch]

Can we use it with Clion？

you can with zigbrains but note that its still just using zls behind the scenes, theres not yet a fully custom plugin built for jetbrains.

[xdBronch]

There needs to be more examples in the documentation, especially in the standard library reference

there is quite a large number of stdlib examples in the form of tests but theyre hard to find and arent presented very well. i think this will be largely improved once doctests are utilized more, you can see what they look like a lot in parts of std.json at the bottom of the page.

[Jarred-Sumner]

Added one for Bun - oven-sh/bun#5611

[godalming123]

1. Please improve compilation speed
2. Add a guide in the docs for converting c code into zig code I wanted to convert a medium sized c project using meson to zig and found that:
   • I did not know how to convert c #ifdef statements into zig, I also needed to know how to define these in a zig build file (previously if a dependency was met the meson.build would define HAVE_XYZ which would enable an extra feature that requires the dependency in the code if this was the case)
   • The guide should include how to take your zig build file that you've created by hand and run a command to see what options you should pass to translate-c to get everything to work
3. Hot code reloading, this is a really cool feature, but only becomes valuable if number 1 is implemented. It would also have to work with c libraries that are being used

[xdBronch]

(1) is well on its way, the x86 backend is nearly ready for use and it alone can give a ~5x compilation speedup compared to the llvm backend. there is also work being done to add incremental compilation which i imagine will be an even bigger improvement along with some other things.
(2) is likely something that will just have to be done by the community at some point, not all ideas translate 1-1 and the core team is busy working on the compiler, not documentation.
(3) is also a WIP, there have even been a couple proof-of-concepts of it

[expikr]

https://github.com/gabdube/native-windows-gui/

A project like this for Zig would be great, the thinnest possible wrapper over winapi syscalls merely to make it idiomatic for Zig.

[jcollie]

https://github.com/gabdube/native-windows-gui/

A project like this for Zig would be great, the thinnest possible wrapper over winapi syscalls merely to make it idiomatic for Zig.

Check out zigwin32:

https://github.com/marlersoft/zigwin32
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsnWZxrf5VE

[expikr]

Check out zigwin32:

https://github.com/marlersoft/zigwin32 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsnWZxrf5VE

That's autogenerated though, not quite "adapting it to be idiomatic zig", and much larger in scope than making just the GUI subset zigernomic to use.

Whereas only focusing on the native Windows controls consists of just the following elements and their respective styles/messages/notifications:

const WC_ANIMATE = "SysAnimate32";
const WC_BUTTON = "Button";
const WC_COMBOBOX = "ComboBox";
const WC_COMBOBOXEX = "ComboBoxEx32";
const WC_DATETIMEPICK = "SysDateTimePick32";
const WC_EDIT = "Edit";
const WC_HEADER = "SysHeader32";
const WC_HOTKEY = "msctls_hotkey32";
const WC_IPADDRESS = "SysIPAddress32";       // obscure
const WC_LINK = "SysLink";
const WC_LISTBOX = "ListBox";
const WC_LISTVIEW = "SysListView32";
const WC_MONTHCAL = "SysMonthCal32";
const WC_NATIVEFONTCTL = "NativeFontCtl";
const WC_PAGESCROLLER = "SysPager";          // obscure
const WC_PROGRESS = "msctls_progress32";
const WC_REBAR = "ReBarWindow32";            // obscure
const WC_SCROLLBAR = "ScrollBar";
const WC_STATIC = "Static";
const WC_STATUSBAR = "msctls_statusbar32";
const WC_TABCONTROL = "SysTabControl32";
const WC_TOOLBAR = "ToolbarWindow32";
const WC_TOOLTIPS = "tooltips_class32";
const WC_TRACKBAR = "msctls_trackbar32";
const WC_TREEVIEW = "SysTreeView32";
const WC_UPDOWN = "msctls_updown32";