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mjakeman/zig-wishlist.md

Created February 2, 2024 01:31
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Matthew's Zig Wishlist
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zig-wishlist.md

Matthew'z Zig Wishlist

From creating my 3D pixel game engine.

Pain Points:

  • Lack of easy polymorphism: I currently used tagged unions and it's fine-ish, but having interfaces or traits in the language would make it infinitely more ergonomic to use.
  • Casting is a nightmare: There really needs to be a shorter way to cast from int -> float and vice-versa. Compare C's (float) with Zig's @as(f32, @floatFromInt(...)). If I could write @floatFromInt(f32, ...) it would already be much better.

Nice to have:

  • Comptime methods: I wanted to add swizzling methods for my custom vector struct, however you cannot generate methods at compile time (?). It would be nice to have a function e.g. Vector(dimension, components) which can then generate swizzle methods for each combination of components. I imagine calling vec.xyzz() and having that method be generated and even inlined at compile time.
  • Easier way to do vector maths: I currently call vec.mul(other) but it would be nice to write vec * other. This requires operator overloading however, which isn't great. Maybe some kind of comptime based DSL?
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