Karl Seguin's Blog - A mix of coding and creative writing

openmymind

A developer struggles with Zig 0.15's new IO interface while trying to upgrade libraries, specifically working with tls.Client. The post details the confusion around buffer management, inconsistent API patterns, and the complexity of converting between different reader/writer types. Despite following documentation and examples, the author encounters compilation errors, hanging programs, and crashes while attempting a simple TLS connection, highlighting the challenges of working with Zig's evolving standard library.

I'm too dumb for Zig's new IO interface

I sincerely love Zig, I love what it taught me, and I deeply want it to succeed, but these changes are something I didn’t really enjoy. I hope I’ll get used to them, but it looks a bit messy sometimes IMO.

0.15 is still being developed. I hope that if user feedback is negative, they continue to adapt and look for different approaches.

I’m not sure about the current state of Zig.
I use raylib for game dev and tool development. I wanted to give zig a try. With version 0.15.
Zig apparently now has a package manager thing where I can do zig fetch to pull stuff. I tried that with raylib and it failed. Apparently at time of writing zig fetch is just broke for some repos.
So I asked an AI what the alternative was. It suggested git submodules.
So I set them up as such. Wrote my hello world in raylib to create a window.
But the build failed, not my code though, the errors were in the raylib bindings, the zig build file. Apparently the build commands were refactored from when the bindings were written versus what is the current standard.
In the end I could not get it to work despite trying many things. Perhaps if I dedicated days and not hours I could have figured it out. But I have no intention of spending multiple days to get a hello-world-level program to work.
This did not leave a favorable impression on me of zig. I’m guessing they are in the move quickly and break things phase of their programming language. I will give a few years and try again later when things are more stable.
I ended up choosing to write that particular application in Rust. Its’ been smooth sailing since.