Conway's Game of Life

[calm river]

👋 Hey everyone! I’ve been learning Zig (and also Raylib), and made a simple implementation of Conway’s Game of Life:
Repo: https://github.com/cincip/game-of-life-zig

This is my first time working with a systems programming language and a game library, so I’d love feedback specifically on:

• How I’ve organized the code (design/architecture, which files do what, etc.)
• Any more “Zig-like” patterns or idioms I should use
• General tips for writing clearer or safer Zig code

It’s still a WIP, so I’d really appreciate any suggestions. Thanks!

[ivory leaf]

I am no game dev, but in the step function in board.zig, you allocate an array and then memcpy to the table of the struct. That is okey but you could consider allocating it in the init, and instead of memcpy you could swap the pointers of the buffers.
I dont know i explained myself clearly

[calm river]

Hello! Thanks for the suggestion! I will improve it today, if I have some time. I was thinking of maybe completely changing the way I save the board. I am thinking about using a hashmap to save only the living cells, but honestly I did not get the documentation on the hashmaps in Zig. Can you please explain how to use it properly🙏

[dapper rain]

https://devlog.hexops.com/2022/zig-hashmaps-explained/ is a good primer. Might want a hashset if you are only storing which cells are alive, pack x and y into one integer and use as the key, use void for the value type.

This is a bit more of a deeper dive, there is a part 2 also: https://www.openmymind.net/Zigs-HashMap-Part-1/