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Writing a Wayland Compositor in Zig - Isaac Freund

Zig SHOWTIME · talk · Watch on YouTube

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

What it is

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.

Why Hacker News recommends it

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

  • 4 people recommended it
  • 3 different months
  • 2 strong recommendations
  • first 2021, last 2021

What HN commenters said

  1. “this talk is phenomenal thank you.”

    Explains why Rust was not chosen for the compositor.

    DyslexicAtheist, 2021-01 · Strong recommendation · in “Should You Write a Wayland Compositor?”

  2. “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”

    Shows Zig embracing a hairy C library, making it more memory safe.

    1_player, 2021-12 · Strong recommendation · in “Zig 0.9.0”

  3. “The author of River has also done some fantastic talks”

    River author's talks on Zig and Wayland.

    jorangreef, 2021-07 · Recommendation · in “River – A dynamic tiling Wayland compositor”

  4. “It is called Zig and here it explains how it solves the same problem”

    Explains how Zig solves C binding problems.

    rmanolis, 2021-12 · Recommendation · in “My negative views on Rust”

Excerpts from Hacker News comments, linked to the originals. Summaries and labels were written by a language model from those comments.

Topics: zig, wayland, river compositor, c interop, systems programming

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