Yesterday’s post was a bit shorter than I planned, since I didn’t manage to go through as much of the ZigLearn chapter 1 as I thought I would. Today we’ll be wrapping it up. Thoughts™️ Same as yesterday, this section will be a brain dump of what I think of the things I learn today. Pointers Rust made pointers a very friendly concept thanks to the borrow checker and amazing compiler diagnostics, and Zig seems to follow the same path with keeping them straightforward....

In the previous post I documented how I went about setting up my Zig environment, and it’s now time to start learning things. My preferred method of learning new languages is rebuilding an existing project in them, like I did when going from Python to Kotlin to Rust. For Zig, I’ve elected to rebuild my healthchecks-rs library. It’s something I use on a day-to-day basis for keeping an eye on my backup jobs, and it would be a great addition to the healthchecks....

Zig is a systems programming language much akin to Rust and C, and has been showing up in my feeds a lot as of late. Many Zig programmers have documented their experience with Zig as much better than with Rust, which I have been programming in for the last year or so, citing simplicity and ease. I tend to agree that Rust can often be complex to enforce the guarantee of being correct, so I set out to finally buy into the promise of Zig and give it a shot....

GitHub Actions has grown at a rapid pace, and has become the CI platform of choice for most open source projects. The recent changes to Travis CI’s pricing for open source is certainly bound to accelerate this even more. Due to it being a first-party addition to GitHub, Actions has nearly infinite potential to run jobs in reaction to changes on GitHub. You can automatically set labels to newly opened pull requests, greet first time contributors, and more....

What is Moshi? Moshi is a fast and powerful JSON parsing library for the JVM and Android, built by the former creators of Google’s Gson to address some of its shortcomings and to have an alternative that was actively maintained. Unlike Gson, Moshi has excellent Kotlin support and supports both reflection based parsing and a kapt-backed codegen backend that eliminates the runtime performance cost in favor of generating adapters during build time....