alt Hacker NewsSo the geniuses in the datacenter prefer to rewrite the full codebase in another language instead of maintaining and improving its own fork or contributing to make the current language better.
Impressive to rewrite 1MLOC in a week yes, but this is more of a job of a million monkey programmers crammed in a datacenter than a bunch geniuses. And I would know, since I'm a monkey programmer who is in danger now... Or maybe the Zig team is in a greater danger, since their brains hold the genius juice the clankers are missing and they should have it by 2027...
No matter how I look at this, it's churn for the sake of churn.
Even if the translation was free and into ideal idiomatic Rust (and it's obviously not - it's now Zig with Rust syntax) then this would be churn for the sake of churn.
At some project scale the language really stops being any limiting factor, and you're instead mostly dealing with working past past architectural decisions, integration of large changes, deep optimization, steering the codebase into alignment with project roadmaps and long-term goals, regression testing as features get introduced, maintenance of multiple release trains... Experienced software engineers mostly stop caring about simple things like the programming language choice at that point, because whatever issues come from that choice have already been resolved. What matters is stability, careful orchestration of large changes and a stable and comprehensive test suite.