Over the past few weeks I have been working on Zagros, a server built in zig, as a fun learning/side project. This is my first 'big' project in zig since I wrote zigClipboard, and while it probably isn't amazing code, it was a fun experience to help deepen my knowledge of zig!


Initially, the idea was for me to start a [REDACTED] for a small community, disconnected from my name and thrown on a $5 vps I'd pay for with XMR, and this made me think, I can use this opportunity to write my own server and (hopefully) squeeze some extra performance out of it (that I wouldn't ever need on the scale I was planning to use it for)


The core of the server is very basic reading and writing requests, and this took like... 20 minutes to write? I think. Server was running on a single thread, dealing with requests one-at-a-time (this was the version I ran the experiment with, if you remember...)


After this I began writing my favorite part of the project, the thread pool, which is very simply just a worker-job queue, I think this was also when I started using arena allocators more? I absolutely love arena allocators, they made the worker handlers really easy to write since I just didn't have to give a shit about what they did with the memory after (though this is kind of a non-issue in zig with defer lmfao)


Within my own usage of the server I went on a side tangent, adding sqlite support and completing (most) of the functionality I needed, which was 100% js free and completely in zig (wahoo!). Performance was really good in the limited testing I did, but I am yet to deploy the application due to not having yet planned the complete flow of how I wanna do certain things (im lazy)


Over the time I spent writing this , I improved my understanding of zig as a language, and I think the things I truly 'learnt' were how to properly use mutexes (simple but I didn't know, sorry!!!!!) and how to structure a project like this.

In the end I had multiple different things being ran from just main.zig (thread pool, static file watcher, cache etc), and while they may seem rudimentary, figuring out how to best interconnect these different parts in a non-dumbass way was quite fun! (Though there is a chance I did indeed lay them out in the dumbass way...)


There are probably more things I learnt from this but I can't recall them rn


This is probably a simple or stupid project for most, and I probably didn't do it in the best way, but I enjoyed the time I spent writing the code and I think I made a good program at the end of it :)


There's still some stuff left to work on I think, which I'll do on weekends or whenever I'm bored. The codebase is also littered with odd comments from me, I don't think i self-censored them or anything so what you see is what I was thinking at the time lol