Gamedev in Zig is actually pretty good (2025)

### TL;DR Zig excels in game development thanks to seamless C interop, fine-grained memory control, and a clean build system. It's especially appealing for developers who prefer low-level control without being bogged down by C++ complexity. While the language is still young (version 0.13) and has issues like a weak LSP and incomplete documentation, it's worth a serious look in 2025. --- ## Why Zig Fits Game Development Zig is a low-level, high-performance systems language that gives you finer control: you allocate and free memory yourself, and you can specify how allocation happens through special allocators (or even write your own). There are no hidden memory allocations and no hidden control flow. No operator overloading — because you probably don't want `+=` to trigger a heap allocation. This aligns well with game development's need for predictable performance. More importantly, Zig seamlessly interoperates with C code. You can use just about any C library in your Zig code. That means you can directly use mature C game libraries (like raylib, SDL, sokol) without writing glue code or dealing with complex bindings. --- ## raylib-zig: The Smoothest Way to Start For most people, **raylib-zig (https://github.com/Not-Net/raylib-zig)** is exactly what you need. It's a very thin set of bindings for the raylib C library, usable in any Zig project. While you can also use raylib directly in a Zig project, this package makes it easier, especially with setup. ### Setup Steps 1. **Install Zig** Download the Zig package or use a package manager. For example, on macOS with Homebrew: ```bash brew install zig ``` 2. **Create a Project** ```bash mkdir youtube-raylib-example && cd $_ zig init ``` This generates `build.zig`, `build.zig.zon`, `main.zig`, and `root.zig`. 3. **Add raylib Dependency** Go to the raylib-zig repository, copy the command to add the dependency, and paste it into your terminal. It will automatically update `build.zig.zon`. Then open `build.zig` and paste the snippet copied from raylib-zig — it fetches the dependency and module, links the library, and adds the import path. 4. **Write Code** Clear `main.zig` and write: ```zig const rl = @import("raylib"); pub fn main() void { rl.initWindow(800, 600, "Zig raylib example"); defer rl.closeWindow(); // use Zig's defer for automatic cleanup while (!rl.windowShouldClose()) { rl.beginDrawing(); rl.clearBackground(rl.Color.skyBlue); rl.endDrawing(); } } ``` 5. **Run** ```bash zig build run ``` The first build compiles raylib, after which you'll see a sky-blue window. > Setting up a project with Zig is much simpler than with C — C requires building from source manually, configuring libraries and environment, then throwing it all into CMake or Makefile. Zig's build system abstracts that away, yet you still have full control. You can look at raylib-zig's `build.zig` and see they're doing the same things you'd do yourself — no black magic. --- ## Other Libraries Worth Noting ### SDL3 (fork) There's a fork of SDL3 that uses the Zig build system. It's essentially the SDL3 repository but switched to `build.zig`. Adding it to your project is as simple as two commands, giving you immediate access to the latest SDL3 (released the day the video was recorded). ### sokol + sokol-zig **sokol (https://github.com/floooh/sokol)** is a header-only C library (like stb) for cross-platform games. It uses different graphics APIs depending on the OS (Metal on macOS, OpenGL on Linux, DirectX on Windows), abstracting away platform-specific code. Getting projects to build across platforms was a pain until **sokol-zig (https://github.com/floooh/sokol-zig)** came along — maintained by the sokol author, it lets you use sokol seamlessly, working on all platforms without remembering different compile commands for each system. ### zig-gamedev A collection of libraries for game development in Zig, including audio, glfw, math libraries, and even its own sdl2/sdl3. Downside: they track Zig nightly builds, so the official 0.13.0 release can't compile them. If you're willing to use nightly, it's a treasure trove. ### Mach Engine An ECS-driven engine similar to Bevy, quite comprehensive, with decent documentation, and actively developed in open source. If you come from a Rust background and want to use ECS for game development, it's worth keeping an eye on. --- ## Author's Personal Project: A Tiny Engine Built in Two Days The author spent two days writing a small engine in Zig for physics simulations. Running `zig build run` shows a helix demo with a skybox, a simple GUI (adjustable camera FOV, velocity, etc.). The experience of working with Zig was much better than writing C directly — in C you'd have to write your own dynamic arrays, but everything in Zig just feels right. The author's summary: It's a great upgrade from using C directly to using C with many modern benefits (but without C++'s kitchen-sink approach). --- ## Zig's Shortcomings ### Poor LSP Experience Zig's LSP is very lacking. For example, if you delete a struct field that's still used elsewhere in the code, the LSP won't report an error — only a color change. This means in Neovim you can't "jump to error", and the problem only surfaces when you run the build command. In contrast, Rust's LSP will complain endlessly about every potential issue. ### Incomplete Documentation Especially the build system, which is one of the more recently changed parts. Some features mentioned in articles turn out to not exist, have different names, or live in completely different structs. You have to dig on your own to resolve issues. But overall, the major problems encountered are not many. --- ## Conclusion Despite Zig being young (0.13), unstable, with things that change and requiring preparedness to modify your codebase, it's a very cool language in the systems programming space. As of 2025, it already shows enormous potential. If you're willing to try something new and accept some rough edges, writing games in Zig can be a very pleasant experience. **Source:** Gamedev in Zig is actually pretty good (2025) - YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xIFpg7sBVs)