This post is a wiki post, the idea is to collect links to collections of Zig projects, for example Awesome Lists or other similar collections, to make it easier to find projects that haven’t explicitly created a showcase topic in this forum.
The word “awesome” in this context makes me cringe. Often these lists end up accumulating unfinished or abandoned projects that, let’s be honest, weren’t very inspired in the first place. To see them boasted as “awesome” makes the whole list unserious and makes the entire Zig community seem like clowns.
I think it would be more tasteful to call these lists “curation”, and then have criteria for what makes a given project included in the list, ideally with “not stale” as a minimum.
awe
an emotion variously combining dread, veneration, and wonder that is inspired by authority or by the sacred or sublime
Not everything is awesome. It’s fine - useful even - to have a categorized list of every Zig project under the sun, but let’s not kid ourselves…
Also I would love to not see “blazingly fast” in any more READMEs, especially if it’s a project whose performance characteristics come from the C library that it wraps.
I agree and maybe it would be good to rethink how these lists are created and curated.
The “awesome” mostly comes from a history of many of those lists being called awesome-something and being findable by typing “awesome something” into a search engine.
I would guess the term awesome in these lists comes more from “hey guys I found something that I think is awesome and I want to share that link with others that might find it useful”, I think in that context it becomes more understandable how these lists accrue things over time and the list itself might not be as awesome, as some individual thought about one entry at some time.
I also think it depends a lot on the list and how actively and with how many people it is curated, additionally they may have different criteria for what makes it into the list.
So I would say most of these lists I have seen have only a few things which are still very relevant and actively maintained, a lot of them contain links to projects that stopped being actively maintained. I still find that useful, to find out about projects that might have been good, but maybe forgotten or abandoned. Some of those could be revived with a few little tweaks and updates.
I also think that the lists themselves are a slow evolving process, that require that enough people care about them and curate them, so I suspect that the “awesome” for the list is a bit of a long term aspirational goal, that just takes a long sustained effort to eventually materialize.
But it is also difficult to automatically measure whether something is still up to date and working, there are some projects that are just done and continue to work. (I guess with Zigs changing nature that is currently more rare)
With the package manager in place, we could start to automate things and build projects with new zig versions automatically and maybe even deprecate things from lists automatically / or half-automated, but that also greatly increases the amount of work to actually add something (unless somebody made it very easy).
Personally I find these lists useful, but I don’t expect everything on there to be the latest state of the art, which can be immediately used, for me it is more to have more of an awareness of what’s out there.
I think for more automated and up to date discovering of packages / projects, more of the community would have to invest time into improving things like this:
While I agree with @andrewrk’s critique and always have, that’s what they’re called and we’re sort of stuck with it. As @Sze’s list makes clear, “awesome Zig” exists in the wild, the blind force of idiom and search-engine mojo is going to keep driving newcomers to those lists.
The closest thing to a solution is making a good one, and keeping it up to date.
This should be the first line of the README.md:
The word “awesome” in this context makes me cringe. Often these lists end up accumulating unfinished or abandoned projects that, let’s be honest, weren’t very inspired in the first place. To see them boasted as “awesome” makes the whole list unserious and makes the entire Zig community seem like clowns.
–Andrew Kelly
It still lacks taste, in my opinion. I don’t think that patch helped. But, since I have no plan to actually put effort in myself, I will keep my stinky opinions of this matter to myself from now on.
