My thoughts on moving my CLI from Deno to Zig

[@abdushakoor0099]

I wanna learn zig, go or rust. Currently leaning towards go

[@CodeWithCypert]

I know Go quite well and Zig and Rust at a beginner proficiency. Go is an extremely good choice to learn in my opinion, but the others are quote interesting choices too!

[@ulrich-tonmoy]

im seeing more zig development prime moving from rust and kind of like zig zig is like c with modern flavor

[@CodeWithCypert]

I’m a big Prime fan and was shocked to see his video yesterday of stopping Rust and looking into Zig but honestly, he said a lot of what I’ve been feeling regarding Rust and Zig so I can totally relate!

[@HammytheSammy-ds2em]

I do C for embedded at work and I started learning Zig for personal projects after I really despised the rigidity of Rust. If I have it my way I’ll never write another line of Rust in my life. Rust is so rigid and the tooling feels like I’m being put into a prison full of micromanagers as correction officers. I understand why developers are trying to build performant stuff on Zig despite it not being mature. It’s simply a pleasant experience and the inconveniences are patched up with huge support of C projects that pick up any failures it currently has.

[@CodeWithCypert]

@ while I don’t know if I’ve been as frustrated with Rust as it sounds like you are, I definitely share that sentiment. Zig has been a happy and powerful solution for me so far!

[@bionic_batman]

Yeah, embedding files into the binary via comptime functions in Zig is kinda nice. Go (another excellent choice for this sort of applications) also has this feature out of the box btw.

[@CodeWithCypert]

It does! I’ve used it for Go in the past and was pleased to find it in Zig as well!

[@knolljo]

How was the learning experience of zig?

[@CodeWithCypert]

I’m still learning it (idioms, best practices, etc), but learning it was similar to my experience trying to learn Rust. I struggled at first, gave up learning it, got excited about it and went back to learning it and it just sorta clicked the second time. That’s not to say I don’t struggle with parts of Zig still - I ran into a problem with this that I wasn’t 100% sure I’m solving correctly and could be leaking memory, but I’ve recently learned how to use the GPA to help detect that, too… so… I guess overall it’s going well :)

[@that_rendle]

Great content but it would be better if you zoomed the browser so viewers can read the text. I use a smaller monitor when recording screencasts, so I am seeing what people on iPad would see full screen, or people on 27” monitors would see in default KZbin.

[@CodeWithCypert]

Thank you for the feedback! I’ll try to incorporate that into future videos

[@pietraderdetective8953]

is this normal in most Typescript project? I don't want to bash TS projects, but I do try to avoid them apps (e.g: VScode --> electron)...other than filesize, the memory it's using is also huge comparatively. When I'm hunting for apps, usually I search for C/C++ then Rust/Zig and lastly Python. Python apps are usually just C wrappers so they're highly efficient. anyway I wonder how's the filesize if you use ReleaseSmall to optimize for size?

[@CodeWithCypert]

Are you asking specifically about the file size? If so, yes when compiling executables. You have to ship a runtime as well and that’s where most of the filesize comes from. Memory can be better managed in a lot of cases, but TypeScript or JavaScript doesn’t provide you with tools to make many impactful decisions regarding memory management. The trade off is that you usually don’t have to think about it, but when it becomes a problem, it becomes a hard to solve one. That’s a good question. I’ll try a ReleaseSmall build too and see how that turns out!

[@bobby9568]

Just found this channel, will you make videos coding from scratch?

[@CodeWithCypert]

I have quite a few videos like that, though most are Svelte and Flutter, but I plan to start doing more of those with Zig in the near future

[@robertvandrovec]

Btw. did you strip info from the executeables? It should make them even smaller 😅

[@CodeWithCypert]

I did not. Can you share any more info on that?

[@robertvandrovec]

@@CodeWithCypert Of course, when compiling via build-exe you can use: -fstrip When using build.zig script just add: exe.root_module.strip = true; For me it reduced binary files approximately 5x, but i don't have any embed files, so it might not be as radical for you. Just keep in mind its meant for final executables, don't use it in development builds, would make debugging much more complex. Would love to know how it worked for you 😁

[@robertvandrovec]

@@CodeWithCypert Of course, when using build-exe just add flag: -fstrip When using build.zig just add: exe.root_module.strip = true; For me it reduced executable size 5x. You have embed some files so it wont be as radical. Just keep in mind its meant for release binaries, when used on your reguar development/debug build it will make debugging really hard. Would be glad to hear how it worked out for you, btw. youtube is deleting my comments for some reason, or my client is just bugged 😐

[@CodeWithCypert]

Thank you for sharing that! I thought you were referring to the original deno implementation as I didn’t expect the zig executables to be able to get much smaller! I’ll have to try that out. I check KZbin to see if any of your comments were being held, but I didn’t see any held comments so I’m not quite sure what the issue is there. I hope it resolves itself though - you have too good of information to not share 😁

[@robertvandrovec]

@@CodeWithCypert Oh sorry for not stating clearly i was talking about Zig. If you care for your executable size so much, you can also create some optimalizations for the embeded files. From what i saw on your public repo, the files you are embeding are not that large, but if they get larger, you might consider doing some optimalizations on them before embeding (be aware this should be done in build script, loading the files, doing transformations, saving data to new files and embeding those new files in your code), like removing comments, unnecessary white spaces etc. Zig embeds the files as they ARE. Even if you wont implement this, i would be interested to hear how the executable size changed after stripping. 😊

[@mystic_monk55]

Why not golang?

[@CodeWithCypert]

Wanted to use Zig to try it out and I’ve built several CLIs in Go (and still consider it an excellent choice). Do you use Go for your CLIs?

[@joshuadonahue5871]

Why not ride a bicycle?

[@CodeWithCypert]

@ 😂 as an aside, cycling is one of my favorite hobbies!

[@10e999]

Using a interpreted language of a CLI is crazy IMO. Welcome to the system programming world !

[@CodeWithCypert]

Eh, I had high hopes for Deno and it allowed me to prototype quickly (I had a solution in less than an hour for the original implementation). I do agree that a better long term plan would be using something smaller like Zig though :)

[@billvog]

Great video! Would you still have the same problem with Bun? Did you consider it?

[@CodeWithCypert]

You know - I had originally given up Node for Bun (there’s even a video of me mentioning that), but Deno version 2 won me back over. I’m truthfully not 100% sure how big the bun version would be, but I believe it would be comparable to my Deno version as bun would still need to ship a runtime with the executable

[@runescapes]

the size difference is very cool, but I'm too lazy think about memory allocations and stuff frfr

[@CodeWithCypert]

Explicitly allocating is definitely a trade-off and its not always the right trade-off to make! Thanks for watching the video and sharing your thoughts, @runescapes! I appreciate it!

[@nikelborm]

look at outdent NPM package for string literals

[@CodeWithCypert]

That’s a neat idea, but I’m not sure that I view indentation as a big enough problem to take on an external dependency to solve that issue. Thank you for sharing that though, it’s neat seeing new ways to handle things!

[@nikelborm]

@@CodeWithCypert Yeah, I totally understand you

[@Richetechguy]

Nice vid been building a zig cli as well its a fun language to write in

[@CodeWithCypert]

I’m glad to hear that you’re enjoying Zig for your CLI! I’ve had a lot of fun with it too. What’s your CLI do?

[@Richetechguy]

@CodeWithCypert it calls my api for reading/writing content into my headless cms

[@CodeWithCypert]

Nice! That sounds like an interesting use case. Why’d you choose zig?

[@Richetechguy]

@CodeWithCypert honestly I normally use Rust for production but it's not fun to code all the time wanted to try something new and Zig came up as something interesting and its been a blast

[@CodeWithCypert]

@Richetechguy 😱! Just kidding. I get it. Rust is not something that I enjoy writing either. Wish it was, but alas it is not and I’m exploring Zig as an alternative

[@abdushakoor0099]

EmbedFile look really awesome

[@CodeWithCypert]

It really is! Plus, you mentioned learning Go in another comment -- it's something that you can do in Go, too!

[@abdushakoor0099]

@CodeWithCypert i used Go to extend pocketbase for a project and it really is awesome.

[@androth1502]

zig is to explicit. prefer odin or c3.

[@CodeWithCypert]

I am going to have to check out Odin!

[@androth1502]

@@CodeWithCypert while c3 is closer to my jam, i love odin's straightforward logical design.

[@StingSting844]

Nice video. Please fix your audio. The words starting S give a screetch sound and it's hard to focus

[@CodeWithCypert]

I appreciate you pointing that out - I’ll make sure to investigate that and get it fixed ASAP!

[@justafreak15able]

That's an issue faced by all content creators from the beginning. It's called Sibilance. I think there are a lot of deEsser software you can use to mitigate this.

[@CodeWithCypert]

@justafreak15able I’ll be sure to check that out for future videos! I recently changed microphones so I probably need to revisit my entire audio pipeline

[@that_rendle]

@@CodeWithCypertI recommend Izotope RX Elements, it has an AI audio cleanup feature that analyzes an hour of audio in about 15 minutes, then automagically fixes hissing, clicks, hums, pops, background noise, etc. worth every cent

[@CodeWithCypert]

Thank you! Ive been applying the De-esser plugin in final cut but havent noticed a ton of difference. Ill definitely check that out!

[@mikkurogue]

Neat stuff, im also learning zig on the side. Mostly due to frustration with dealing with nodejs, and the entire ecosystem around it being essentially one big meme. Ive been enjoying my time in zig, especially given i come from more of a web background and i want to learn more of the lower-level or systems type of stuff to expand my already relatively wide skill set, but into a different branch of the industry. Zig has a few quirks im not the biggest fan of (like auto formatting being wonky, and i cant seem to configure it to my liking but thats maybe a skill issue) and the documentation being somewhat vague for a few things, but overall i really love the experience

[@CodeWithCypert]

The documentation is a miss right now, in my opinion. I’ve had to dig into Zig source code to figure out how certain things actually work (many times too). I don’t believe you’re expected to be able to configure the formatter. I think the idea is a standard format that not everyone agrees on is better than 500+ different formats but each one makes its owner individually happy. I could be wrong on that though. I agree with Node and its ecosystem. My background is predominantly frontend web, with some backend and mobile, and I’m just tired of Node and its ecosystem, which is what originally prompted me to look at Deno - which is better than Node for sure, and I still plan to use Deno for a few projects, too!

[@mikkurogue]

@@CodeWithCypert Yeah for sure, some of the docs are a bit weird, some bits are documented perfectly well but others have literally just the source code and no tests and im just "wut" facing the entire time lol. I have been thinking of deno, but I also want to give Bun a try because its written in Zig too. My experience is "full stack" but only out of necessity, i just like doing whatever I want and what is cool and best for the job. I also do believe a TON of people are moving over to Zig now too because of all the praise its getting from bigger creators and other businesses migrating over slowly, which is great because zig will mature faster with more adopters and contributors

[@CodeWithCypert]

@ I think you’re right. I was shocked to hear @ThePrimeagen mention that he was considering Zig for 2025. Here’s hoping that’s good for the community!