Developers share their experience using Zig on a 100,000-line game project

A video has been published on YouTube in which developers share their impressions of using the Zig programming language on a long-term game project.

Three years and a hundred thousand lines

The authors are working on a game whose codebase currently comes to about 100,000 lines of Zig. Development has been under way for three years now — enough time, they say, to form a balanced opinion of the language under real-world conditions rather than on small trial projects.

Why it matters

Zig remains a relatively young language, positioned as an alternative to C with more modern facilities for memory safety and build convenience, yet it has not reached a stable 1.0 release. Feedback from developers using it in large, long-term projects is of particular interest to the community, since little such experience has been accumulated so far.

Game development is considered a demanding field in terms of performance, memory management and tooling stability, so the experience of using Zig specifically in this context can give a fuller picture of the language's maturity than feedback from less demanding scenarios.

The details — including the specific pros and cons the team ran into over three years of work — are revealed in the video itself.

Source: Lobsters