Nov. 13, 2020, 1:39 a.m.

Virtuosity & Interfaces in Zig! ⚡ Zig SHOWTIME #17

Zig SHOWTIME

The Zig SHOWTIME Discord server
is now open for business!

JOIN NOW!

(From the Community Wiki Page)
The Zig SHOWTIME Discord server serves as a coordination tool for organizing the show, and as a place where people invested in the success of Zig can socialize and collaborate together on new projects. The main goal of this space is to create a community of creators (be it code, blogs, videos, or undefined), so that we can all make the most out of our Zig experience. Nobody is born knowing Zig so everyone is welcome to have fun in this server but, if you're unsure whether Zig is the right language for you, I recommend checking out first other Zig communities as they might be more focused on helping newcomers to the language.

The next episode of Zig SHOWTIME airs on
Saturday 14th of November!

Times for a few different timezones:
1:00pm CST / 20.00 CET / 12:30am IST (Sun) / 3:00am SGT (Sun) / 4:00am JST (Sun)

Go to https://zig.show for more info or subscribe to the Zig SHOWTIME calendar (iCal) to have all episodes automatically added to your calendar.

Padding

Not sure how it looks like from the other side of the fence, but the last couple of weeks have been hard, between Covid spiking up again, and other various issues affecting the new release more or less directly.

I personally was a bit surprised at how much interest there was for the 0.7.0 release! I imagined we would get a similar increase for the release of the self-hosted compiler, not for a relatively minor release, but it seems that we are accelerating faster than I expected.

Next release we’ll make sure to take all the time needed to get every detail right and maximize the impact we can have on the public. It’s going to be great, I’m sure.

On a side note, the “show us something” format turned out to be great. I loved it, and I think I’ll try to incorporate it into SHOWTIME itself, maybe by having an episode like that every now and then.

Finally, I’ve submitted an application to FOSDEM to get a Dev Room (thanks to Jakub for pinging me about it), we were supposed to know yesterday if we got accepted or not, but I guess we’re not the only ones having trouble with schedules. Hopefully we’ll know in a few more days. If we do get accepted, I’ll open a Call for Papers for it, so get ready!

New Episode

Runtime polymorphism: why, how?

By Alex Naskos

> In this talk, we are going to be discussing runtime polymorphism (also known as dynamic dispatch). The focus will be on comparing various implementations in zig and showing the differences in emitted code and in usability.

There’s a lot that you can achieve with Zig if you take a moment to learn the details and maybe sprinkle a bit of comptime magic on it. This means that runtime interfaces / dynamic dispatch can be implemented in userland, and that’s what Alex is going to talk about.

Can you imagine how lame it would be if Zig hardcoded in the language one specific implementation of interfaces when you have this power at your disposal?


Virtuosismi d’espressione in Zig

By Loris Cro

Let’s talk about virtuosity using Zig expressions. This is going to be a very short talk pointing out clever things that you can do with expressions in Zig.

Also, if you don’t know what’s a virtuoso, no worries, I’ll explain that too :)

Last Episode

The last episode was the Zig 0.7.0 release party. It featured a few people showing us random things and some discussions around the present and future of Zig.

Here you can find the full video.

See you at showtime,
Loris Cro

You just read issue #10 of Zig SHOWTIME. You can also browse the full archives of this newsletter.

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