Pledging another $400k to the Zig software foundation

Posted by tosh 7 hours ago

Pledging another $400k to the Zig software foundation(mitchellh.com)

614 points | 200 commentspage 3

acedTrex 6 hours ago|

I started using zig more heavily for some edge device ML inference projects lately after watching Andrews jetbrains interview and it really really resonating with me on a personal level.

Am also really overall enjoying the language, it def has some rough spots regarding documentation and the stdlib but overall has been very nice to work with in neovim.

I can't throw 400k but I'll go ahead and pledge some dollars towards it as well.

hacker_88 3 hours ago||

Is Bun's Zig fork called Bunzig ?

randypewick 5 hours ago||

Yay a big win for open source!

Now I wonder what other donations were deemed as much as - or more - useful.

throwaw12 7 hours ago||

I read it as a pledge to continue doing non-AI-LLM-slop work. End result could be interesting for everyone, on one side project with no-LLM policy and on the other side projects which heavily rely on LLMs.

In the short term we might not see the benefits, this pledge reads like: "Please keep doing what you are doing now, I am interested in how far it goes" (not in any negative sense)

Surac 5 hours ago||

do good and talk about post

hylaride 7 hours ago||

If I ever get "fuck you" money like Mitchell did, I plan to use his post-money life as an inspiration to "retire".

hresvelgr 7 hours ago||

Another language that is in a similar space to Zig that I think deserves more attention, particularly for funding is Odin. While I think Zig is a great language, there is a consistency of design and simplicity to Odin that makes low-level programming more ergonomic and enjoyable to me. While Zig boasts a lot of impressive projects, Odin was used to build the JangaFX suite[1].

[1] https://jangafx.com/

rootlocus 4 hours ago||

Ginger Bill, the Odin language developer, is openly hostile against package managers (he wrote a post called "Package Managers Are Evil") so he maintains his own wrappers of popular C libraries in vendor folder next to the compiler. That doesn't sound like a healthy ecosystem to me.

I think zig is also highly opinionated but it always seemed to me that Andrew started from solid pillars and made an excellent job of carefully considering each feature that was added to the language:

- No hidden control flow.

- No hidden memory allocations.

- No preprocessor, no macros.

Odin on the other hand is just some developer's personal taste marketed as "Programming Done Right". So, if you disagree with any choice Bill made, you're not doing programming right.

hiccuphippo 2 hours ago||

You could use Zig's package fetching system for Odin vendor packages since they made it work with C libraries for Zig.

Zig doesn't have a centralized package management system though. It's all links to tar.gz/git with integrity hashes.

b-kf 6 hours ago||

Appreciate Odin, especially the batteries included approach (simple to use structure of arrays, matrices, array programming, the context system for custom allocators, ...). To be fair though: the heavy lifting in JangaFX is likely done by a ton of C++ code, it being high performance real time graphics programming.

I assume C++ outweighs Odin in their code base by a significant margin (accounting for all dependencies).

cute_boi 6 hours ago||

I have been using zig and it is so much better. I am thankful they are avoiding vibe slop in compilers.

reinitctxoffset 5 hours ago||

Low value comment but obligatory to a superfan: mitchellh is based AF and it just keeps giving back. I switched to `ghostel` in emacs this weekend and it's give or take life changing.

Keep being the fuckin man.

yuvrajsa 6 hours ago|

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