A few weeks ago I embarked on a project to build a debugger in Zig with Zig. Up until this point the only time I've used a debugger was when I was following along with handmade hero and noticed that the debugger did not work on my computer. Or it did work but stopped once I updated Zig. To be fair I haven't gone back to check if it's still not working because at this point I've decided to go ahead and build one. For some reason I think I can do a better job, having never used a debugger for more than five minutes. Some optimism required. That hasn't exactly gone to plan as my window which was built on X11 no longer works as a couple of weeks ago I "had" to upgrade my OS and the upgraded version uses Wayland. Now you can get X11 window to work with Wayland but I figured it's early enough that I could just use Wayland to get a window. The rendering methods all work on bytes so it really would not make a difference.
There's only one problem. Wayland or the libwayland-client that I decided to use works nothing like X11. To the point I could not even figure out a second method to call after getting the display. Turns out you can write your own client. So that is exactly what I'm going to do. I've been totally inspired by this video by @sphaerophoria. Frankly it looks quite intimidating but a part of me wants to do exactly that. I've saved the resources he goes through and of course there is the wisdom of those who have gone before me that I shall heavily depend on. Also I've been quite inspired by his approach to building things from scratch. It's a nice change of pace at least when it comes to your own projects to take your time and just figure things that is not what you originally set out to do.
It feels out of my depth especially since I'm streaming this at the same time. Lately it's been making me not want to stream or procrastinate from streaming. But that one video has given me some confidence to attempt it. Mostly because of the list of resources that I can now rely on to guide me through the process of building a Wayland client. Just a slight detour on the way to building a debugger.