Moving to Zig

It has been half a year since I last made a commit on Reckless Drivin’. This is mostly due to being busy with school, but I have also reached a point in the reimplementation where I need to decide how to draw to the screen. I see two options:

• Draw to a simple framebuffer.
• Use (and learn) OpenGL.

When making a CHIP-8 interpreter I used SDL surfaces, so I am familiar with the basics. The original Reckless Drivin’ game drew to the screen in similar ways, and that was on 2000’s hardware, so there isn’t any performance penalty for doing it this way. However, I would like to learn OpenGL (even if I am only drawing 2D sprites), so I am leaning toward this route.

This time away from the project has also led me to think about a full rewrite in Zig, rather than porting the original C source. Since learning it last summer I have been using Zig for more and more of my projects. I really enjoy the language, and that it addresses many of the downsides of C while still staying simple.

Here are some of the benefits I see for moving to Zig:

• I am currently super excited about Zig, so the more opportunities to write Zig code the better!
• I would be indirectly supporting Zig. Working on a larger project like Reckless Drivin’ is likely to find bugs or areas where Zig can improve, and I would love to help.
• Stellar support for cross-compilation. This has already been helpful while working on zf, and I wouldn’t want to give that up on Reckless Drivin’.
• mach-glfw bindings for GLFW for better typing, errors, slices, packed structs for bit masks, etc. which seems to be a more productive developer experience over working directly in C.
• Unit testing integrated into the language.

Downsides:

• More work up front. I expect that converting all the code I have now (loading the resource data, decompression, decryption, preferences saving and loading, CMake configurations, tests, etc.) will not be a simple task. The improved safety of Zig will likely find many bugs I have lingering around (Which is good!) and those will take time to fix.
• A rewrite in C would likely stay close to the general structure of the original project. A rewrite in Zig might require modifying more of the architecture of the code, due to things like the lack of a global allocator. This is a good thing, but is again more work.
• Zig is an unstable, changing language. Any language changes would likely require making large changes across the project.

After considering the above points for some time, I have decided to rewrite in Zig!¹ While this does mean Open Reckless Drivin’ will be farther removed from the original source from Jonas, I think this is the best option.

So why am I writing this? At this point, I don’t think many (or any) people are following my blog or project closely.² But working in public motivates me to stick to my goals, which now include rewriting Open Reckless Drivin’ in Zig starting today! Here is the plan:

• The project isn’t far enough along to merit making a new project, so all work will continue in the same repo.
• Work through the code in the same order I did in C. So resource loading, decompression, decryption, and preferences loading.
• Once I have made it that far, it will be time to learn OpenGL!

I am excited to see where this goes!