(tracking issue) Most important Zig issues affecting Tides of Revival

[Srekel]

Note: This issue was created simply to provide a way for us to communicate to the Zig project about our most important Zig issues. We have provided them this link on their Third Party Tracking Issues (what is important to other people?) page

Debugging

This definitely is at the top of my list. There are numerous issues for us developing Tides of Revival, all using Windows (11 I believe), with VS Code/Visual Studio/ZLS/VS Code Zig plugin, building against the msvc_abi (though it was equally bad under the default gnu abi as far as I can remember).

Many variables optimized away:

This is true for both const and var variables. (both should be inspectable)

Stepping "over" through the code with F10 doesn't actually indicate the line, sometimes it seemingly stops on lines it doesn't execute.

ziglang/zig#19443

Sometimes stepping over with F10 steps into (as though you'd pressed F11.

☝️

Data seemingly sometimes wrong (best case garbled so you know it's not the actual value, worst case untrustworthy)

☝️

Can't inspect various variables and consts

They don't show up in the watch window but are often very useful to be able to inspect.
ziglang/zig#15095
ziglang/zig#20259
ziglang/zig#20258

No "prettyprinting" in watch window

I just learned that for lldb and gdb there are "pretty printers". For windows/VS debugging I guess there'd need to be natvis counterparts. Strong requirement for good debugging on Windows.

Const vs Var

Major issue, maybe not, but certainly with the type of code we write, the requirement to be const correct is a detriment to our speed more so than an aid in preventing bugs. Now, I don't think removing the requirement is necessary, but I do think thee Zig team should focus on making it possible for tooling (e.g. the VS Code plugin/ZLS/autofmt) to fix it automatically.

Short Vector Primitives

This one probably goes by many names and the exact solution isn't super important but I do think this would be quite helpful. ziglang/zig#7295

With this, there would still be multiple math libraries out there but instead of all solving the same basic tasks in different ways, they could expose higher order functionality.

Compile times

I know this is a top-prio so just noting here for cheering it on. For games having millisecond-long compiletimes is a game changer to having second-long, not to mention minute-long compile times.

Hot reload

I again, I know this is a priority, just saying it would be super sweet. Hopefully it doesn't come with too many restrictions.

[ofrank123]

I'd like to add, I am part of another game development project using Zig, and these are more or less my exact painpoints. Not sure if we're worth our own tracking issue just yet, but wanted to +1 this as the debugging situation on Windows is very bad currently. Loving Zig otherwise!