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authorMartin Ashby <martin@ashbysoft.com>2024-12-21 22:18:18 +0000
committerMartin Ashby <martin@ashbysoft.com>2024-12-21 22:18:18 +0000
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Bump zine 0.3.0 -> 0.8.0
Fix a lot of associated breakage Fix broken rss.xml file as highlighted to me by Matthijs van der Wild (thanks!)
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+---
+.title = "Mcl (minecraft launcher)",
+.author = "Martin Ashby",
+.date = @date("2023-09-12T07:03:15+01:00"),
+.layout = "single.shtml",
+.custom = {"comments": true},
+---
+
+I wrote a [minecraft launcher](https://code.mfashby.net/mcl/about/) in [zig](https://ziglang.org/) as a learning exercise.
+
+I got a lot of practice writing zig code and I learned a few things about it.
+
+- The [GeneralPurposeAllocator](https://ziglang.org/documentation/master/std/#A;std:heap.GeneralPurposeAllocator) is really useful for finding memory leaks, as is the std.testing.allocator for use in tests.
+- The standard library HTTP client is really cool, but unfortunately fails on a lot of websites because it lacks TLSv1.2 support.
+- Calling into C code is really easy. I used [libCURL](https://curl.se/libcurl/) instead of the zig stdlib and it was easy to write a wrapper around it.
+- The standard library JSON parsing is good, but error messages are not verbose enough to help you and by default they don't indicate _where_ in the tree the problem is. This can be added but it's not obvious how to do it (spoiler: set the .diagnostics element on a std.json.Scanner). For types which the standard library can't cope with, there is an escape hatch: implement jsonParse method for that type.
+- The builtin module has useful constants for checking the current operating system and CPU architecture, which I used for hacking in linux-aarch64 support.
+
+Finally however, I learned that minecraft on the pinebook pro sucks :( It's just not got enough power to run the game well. \ No newline at end of file