Are there any good windowing libraries?

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I tried using GLFW with Zig’s C interop. However, I couldn’t figure that out after several hours.

All of the GLFW bindings I found are designed for Zig 0.14, however I am using 0.15 currently.

Are there any good windowing libraries (or bindings) for zig?

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Shameless plug, but you could give sokol a try, the ‘GLFW equivalent’ is sokol.app. It’s originally a C library, but with somewhat ‘idiomatic bindings’.

The C project is here:

Bindings with Zig examples are here:

…and a simple Dear ImGui example:

You’ll need the very latest nightly, which has a package-fetch problem on Windows. On macOS or Linux you should be fine.

PS: expect some limitations compared to GLFW or SDL though, mainly that only single-window-apps are supported and instead of an “own the game loop” model there are frame- and event-callbacks. In exchange you get better web support and builtin support for D3D11, Metal, WebGL and WebGPU. I wrote sokol-app originally to get some sort of simple window- and input-support at all across all platforms supported by sokol-gfx without having to pull in a GLFW or SDL dependency, not really as a fully-featured GLFW replacement :slight_smile:

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Sokol looks awesome, however I am unfortunately stuck on the affected Windows at the moment.

Are there any plans to fix that soon?

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What do you actually want to do with the window?
Do you want to use some particular graphics api or not?
Any specific criteria?

I think using 0.14 would give you more options, because it is likely they target either 0.14 or 0.14.1 or whatever is the latest mach nominated version.

At least I haven’t seen many graphics related projects that track zig master.

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@castholm’s project states in the readme that it supports both 0.14.1 and 0.15.0-dev (master):

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Just vulkan. All I actually need is the windowing part.

SDL3 zig port looks awesome. I’ll check that out.

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Maybe you could do something similar to the example from https://github.com/Snektron/vulkan-zig/tree/master?tab=readme-ov-file#example it seems it uses GLFW in a relatively minimal way, but it uses a system dependency.

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