This is a blank "hello triangle" project that links the static libraries for bgfx and SDL2 and renders a very basic triangle. I found it very difficult to accomplish this because I had very little knowledge about toolchains, libraries, or compiling C libraries, and then using them with Zig. Hopefully, this provides some ease of use. I've furthermore documented the process I used to set it up so I remember the exact steps I took.
- SDL2: This was very easy to get working as they upload the latest release compiled in a static library on their github releases.
- BGFX: This was more cumbersome to download and get working as the resources online are very few, and further implementing it in Zig is even more sparse.
I've only used these steps for Windows, and there could be better more efficient ways, but this is how I did it and got it working.
- Zig
- make
These are listed from the BGFX official documentation so I'd recommend installing them as well
- First download the three repositories required for bgfx
git clone https://github.com/bkaradzic/bx.git
git clone https://github.com/bkaradzic/bimg.git
git clone https://github.com/bkaradzic/bgfx.git
- Once these are downloaded,
cdinto thebgfxfolder. This is where you'll be running the tools. - Run the following command to generate the required makefiles
..\bx\tools\bin\windows\genie.exe --gcc=mingw-gcc --with-sdl --with-tools gmake
cdinto the.build\projects\gmake-mingw-gccfolder. If you are on an Arm chip, or a different operating system this will be different.- I didn't want to go through the process of installing and setting up MINGW so I used Zig's drop-in C and C++ compiler
make config=release64 CC="zig cc" CXX="zig c++" AR="zig ar" bx bimg bgfx shaderc
This should take a few minutes and compile everything you need for the project in the .build\win64_mingw-gcc folder