It would be awesome to understand the reasons zig was utilized.
My guess is that it is about the language tooling, but it would be nice to hear from the authors themselves.
My guess is that it is about the language tooling, but it would be nice to hear from the authors themselves.
I really enjoy the balance of safety and control in Zig. I can build using Debug mode during development, turning nearly all my bugs into crashes which are easily fixable using in-browser source-level debugging. But in Release-Small mode the result is fast and more importantly really small since there's a 64kb cartridge limit.
Another factor is the Zig Standard Library which designed to be portable and usable on freestanding targets. I can not emphasize enough how pleasant this is. For example I can just use a `std.heap.FixedBufferAllocator` to back a `std.ArrayList` with no problem.
The comptime feature of Zig also comes in handy when you have to minimize code size.
The seamless C interop furthermore improves my productivity since I can just use any C code I like. I've used a C perlin noise library in a previous game for example, saving me a lot of time.
Plus I've used Zig for the previous WASM-4 jam and just liked it so I didn't bother trying any other language.
Rust is the highest level represented. I'm guessing the level of control needed to hit the tight constraints of wasm-4 preclude anything that you wouldn't use for a microcontroller. C and c++ would work too, but what fun is that?
https://youtu.be/7ydnjX999kk?t=894
I also think that there is a correlation between the majority of participants being from Europe and Zig. At the moment almost all our meetups are in Europe.