Luke Boswell (Oct 10 2024 at 00:11): Luke Boswell (Oct 10 2024 at 00:11):I just wanted to announce that I've upgraded https://github.com/lukewilliamboswell/roc-ray
It's still in a fairly primitive state, but I've upgraded the key parts so it's now much easier to use and contribute to. I'm hoping others may find this helpful or be interested to add more functionality. It's a great way to learn more about zig and platform development.
Basically, I updated to use a nix flake so it's easier to get the correct roc and zig dependencies.
I also upgraded to use a newer zig library for bindings to raylib and raygui which are much simpler and now support zig 0.13.0. This is a major simplification with these dependencies.
I also updated the CI so it's easier to check everything in GH PR's.
Thank you to @Jared Cone for help with updating the roc code to the latest features like Task as builtin etc.
If there is demand for it, we can probably also make a URL release which would also make it easier to use for application authors.
There's a lot more we can do here, but now it should be much easier for people to get up and running.
Luke Boswell (Oct 10 2024 at 00:24):Also, this platform has been really helpful for my previous past experiments. There's still some strange ways of doing things in there -- which I think most of this can be ripped out and replaced.
I think it has potential to grow up and become a real graphics and GUI platform... just need to shake out the API we want for how to do things like drawing or working with interactive GUI things.
The gui-counter example currently implements a proof of concept for Richard's Action-State proposal. There's a lot more here we can experiment with.
Aside from that, the biggest missing piece for an ergonomic GUI experience is a layout algorithm in pure roc.
Luke Boswell (Oct 10 2024 at 00:29):Also -- I've only tested on my apple silicon mac. It should work ok on x64 linux (but haven't tested yet). We should be able to support more OS/Archs like Windows and etc without much trouble.
Luke Boswell (Oct 11 2024 at 03:23):I've cut an unofficial build of roc for Windows :window:, added a PowerShell script, and updated the README for roc-ray to explain how to use this platform.
I switched things around and now zig drives the linking. This avoids some complications I was having with dependencies etc when roc was in charge. Long term we can still have a nice URL release and the nice surgical linking experience etc, but for now I think this is ok to get people up and running.
If anyone checks this out I'd love to know how you go using Windows.
Luke Boswell (Oct 11 2024 at 03:25):Here's the GUI Counter demo on Windows :smiley:
Dan G Knutson (Oct 11 2024 at 22:59):This is so cool! The examples are working great for me on both Windows and PopOS. I'm going to try the platform out this weekend.
Dan G Knutson (Oct 14 2024 at 00:55):Recording 2024-10-13 195522.mp4
Last updated: Jul 26 2025 at 12:14 UTC