Zig build system and river Wayland compositor

Zig build system and river Wayland compositor

[Felix Lechner via Development of GNU Guix and the GNU System distribution.]

Hi,

I declared Bug#60889, [1] which provides a Zig build system, as a
prerequisite for Bug#64208. [2] The latter packages two Zig
applications that use the build system in the former.

One of the Zig applications is a new Wayland compositor called River. [3][4]

The Debbugs change is not visible in Mumi, so a brief note here seemed
appropriate. The bug control system [5] has in fact many advanced
features that can help manage large numbers of bugs. Like most large
software projects, GNU Guix has a lot of open patches and bug reports.

While I have everyone's attention, I'd also like to take the
opportunity to ask any available committers to please review the new
Zig build system.

Zig is an exciting language. [6] Using strong but inferred types, it
brings many of Rust's ideas to a language that looks and compiles like
C yet feels like a script. I like GNU Guile much better but to this
author, Zig appears as a more natural evolution of the C ecosystem for
system-level programming than Golang. (I hope neither Rob Pike or Ken
Thompson take offense.)

Most notably, the Zig tooling is super easy to use, especially for
wasm32-wasi. Please try it one day & thanks!

Kind regards
Felix

cc: Ekaitz

[1] https://debbugs.gnu.org/60889
[2] https://debbugs.gnu.org/64208
[3] https://isaacfreund.com/blog/river-intro/
[4] https://archive.fosdem.org/2021/schedule/event/zig_wayland/
[5] https://debbugs.gnu.org/server-control.html
[6] https://www.infoworld.com/article/3689648/meet-the-zig-programming-language.html

Re: Zig build system and river Wayland compositor

[Ekaitz Zarraga]

------- Original Message -------
On Wednesday, June 21st, 2023 at 3:43 PM, Felix Lechner <felix.lechner@lease-up.com> wrote:


> Hi,
> 
> I declared Bug#60889, [1] which provides a Zig build system, as a
> prerequisite for Bug#64208. [2] The latter packages two Zig
> applications that use the build system in the former.
> 
> One of the Zig applications is a new Wayland compositor called River. [3][4]
> 
> The Debbugs change is not visible in Mumi, so a brief note here seemed
> appropriate. The bug control system [5] has in fact many advanced
> features that can help manage large numbers of bugs. Like most large
> software projects, GNU Guix has a lot of open patches and bug reports.
> 
> While I have everyone's attention, I'd also like to take the
> opportunity to ask any available committers to please review the new
> Zig build system.
> 
> Zig is an exciting language. [6] Using strong but inferred types, it
> brings many of Rust's ideas to a language that looks and compiles like
> C yet feels like a script. I like GNU Guile much better but to this
> author, Zig appears as a more natural evolution of the C ecosystem for
> system-level programming than Golang. (I hope neither Rob Pike or Ken
> Thompson take offense.)
> 
> Most notably, the Zig tooling is super easy to use, especially for
> wasm32-wasi. Please try it one day & thanks!
> 
> Kind regards
> Felix
> 
> cc: Ekaitz
> 
> [1] https://debbugs.gnu.org/60889
> [2] https://debbugs.gnu.org/64208
> [3] https://isaacfreund.com/blog/river-intro/
> [4] https://archive.fosdem.org/2021/schedule/event/zig_wayland/
> [5] https://debbugs.gnu.org/server-control.html
> [6] https://www.infoworld.com/article/3689648/meet-the-zig-programming-language.html


Thanks for the work on this, Felix.

Looks like the build system was ready for production after all.

Maybe a maintainer / commiter can take a look into this and guide us to the final inclusion in guix?
Efraim, can you please take a look, this have been sitting for a while (half a year :( ) and it looks like it starts to have some interests.
I'm not sure about the cross-compilation yet, even though I tried it and worked properly, but the native one seems to be ready.

Also this might be a great opportunity. We can attract some people from the Zig community as they don't really have a Zig package manager yet (they are building one!) and Felix and I will push Guix a little bit in their community (right Felix? :))

Thanks all for your work.

Ekaitz

Re: Zig build system and river Wayland compositor

[Pjotr Prins]

Thanks for the package updates - we are using them.

Pj.