Zig talk @ Bologna JS

Slides and code for my talk on Zig at Bologna JS.

I gave a similar presentation at pisa.dev. That presentation was more focused on the Zig C-interop, this presentation focuses on how to use Zig in a JS project. Moe precisely, in this presentation I talked about:

1. Why Zig might be interesting for a JS developer. And why it could more interesting than other compiled languages (e.g. C, C++, Rust).
2. Features that Zig decides to leave out of the language, and why.
3. Building a project: JS vs Zig.
4. Error handling: JS vs Zig.
5. How to develop hybrid JS/Zig projects (for the browser, Node.js, and for other runtimes).
6. How to use Zig libraries, and the Zig package manager.

The presentation is available online: https://zig-bolognajs.vercel.app/

In alternative, you can download the slides as a PDF: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jackdbd/zig-bolognajs/main/assets/zig-bolognajs.pdf

If you want to run the presentation locally or modify it, follow the instructions below.

Installation

This presentation is a Vue.js application built with Slidev. You can install its dependencies with the following command:

npm install

Development

Slidev can hot-code reload this presentation thanks to Vite. Zig cannot yet do it, but as a workaround we can list all zig source files and use entr to watch them for changes.

Launch the Vite dev server and re-compile all WebAssembly modules with this command:

npm run dev

You can now view the presentation on localhost:

• Play mode: http://localhost:3030/1
• Presenter mode: http://localhost:3030/presenter/1

Deploy

The presentation will be automatically deployed to Vercel on each git push.

ℹ️ Since the zig compiler is not available on Vercel, and since I don't want to download it on each deployment, I rely on a pre-push git hook to build all WebAssembly modules locally. All files that end up in public/ will be hosted as static files on Vercel. I'm not sure whether it is possible to push the .wasm modules to Vercel without tracking them in git. I tried to ignore them in the .gitignore and unignore them in the .vercelignore, but that didn't work.

PDF export

Slidev allows exporting the slides to a PDF. This feature relies on Playwright and requires playwright-chromium to be available.

ℹ️ Since I don't want to install Playwright when building on Vercel (so deployments are faster), I declare playwright-chromium as a dev dependency and set npm install --omit=dev as the Vercel installCommand in vercel.json.

Run this command to export the presentation to assets/zig-bolognajs.pdf and the notes to assets/zig-bolognajs-notes.pdf.

npm run build:pdf