Pledging another $400k to the Zig software foundation

What a word of wisdom right there, the bit about internet is beautiful because it's ok to be weird - this is often the opposite on twitter, fb, reddit and many discords where if you have a different opinion you get mobbed by angry comments making one feel worse about their own weirdness.

It's great to be in a position to do this, however I'm beginning to think that their greater contribution is ghostty

I don't really know how to value things any more when I see someone develop a tool that is kind-of useful that then gets acquired for half a billion dollars. As someone with a decent number of decades of terminal hopping, the improvement that ghostty has brought a breath of fresh air. To me it has represented more utility that a few of those acquisitions.

I think it makes perfect sense for Zig to have their stand against LLM contributions while consumers of the compiler/Zig project overall use whatever code aids they like. Building a language is not a matter of churning out as much greenfield code as possible, but in careful consideration of whether or not some feature and its implementation fits coherently into the entire overall language. It's upstream of so much, and we now have decades and decades of examples where just letting rip with new additions renders a language schizoid and unergonomic. An LLM's tendency to "yes, of course, and," to any suggestion is not what a healthy language project needs, but it can be tremendously useful for someone employing a balanced and ergonomic language to generate products. I'm glad to see Mitchell keeping a cool head as the unfortunate tendency in so many devs to take sides and get dogmatic plays out yet again.

I have been experimenting with modifying Ghostty lately. It's a well attended codebase and a pleasure to work with, props to Mitchell.

Since Ghostty is written in Zig, I ended up adding native Zig AST support in Dirac (https://github.com/dirac-run/dirac/blob/master/src/services/...)

One thing the has been a little unintuitive is the pattern of all code and tests in single files, which makes the filesizes grow much larger. Also if you're coming from inheritance supported languages, Zig forces a different way of thinking

Mitchell Hashimoto, talk about putting your money where your mouth is. What a cool dude. Much respect!

If you're unsure about spending the time to learn Zig, I really recommend watching the following interview with the creator of Zig https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqddnwKF8HQ convinced me more than any design doc or blogpost could

Zig is really nice. I enjoy using it a lot. Glad to hear that it is getting a little more funding.

Adults responding in adult ways. Respect.

Is Bun's Zig fork called Bunzig ?

It must be pretty satisfying to be able to throw that kind of money at stuff you admire.

Major props to Mitchell (and his family) for these donations.

I would gladly donate this much to NetBSD foundation.

I'm not in the OSS world much so hopefully someone can help me understand: what does 700k buy you in OSS language development?

This is great IMO. I like zig as a language and the idea behind it. But boy, it has a syntax issue. I with they figure out better syntax before 1.0, developer ergonomics I think are as important.

I really appreciate the "it's okay to be weird" sentiment. It has never been easier to try out a crazy idea. We may as well embrace it and try to learn something.

Yay a big win for open source!

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

I love this guy

Nothing more beautiful when game recognizes game.

> I use AI heavily. I've written about my AI adoption journey and shipping real features with AI assistance. I'm also quite vocal about remaining rational about its capabilities and frustrated with its negative impacts on open source.

> The point is that I have opinions. Those opinions don't fully align with ZSF's approach. And yet, I have nothing but respect for ZSF: the people, the policies, and the project. Part of what makes the internet and open source great is that projects can be weird and different. They can set unusual boundaries, build their own culture, and pursue quality in ways that won't make sense to everyone.

Mitchell does feel like the adult in the room when other people are having chain-saws and acting irrationally for a lack of better term (for example jared/bun controversy which the post just somewhat touches on)

(Mitchell's tweet about AI psychosis is genuinely influential and is now a pointer to what this phenomenon might be)

I really think him and simon's opinions are somehow decently nuanced opinions on AI that the internet has to offer.

Now glazing of mitchell aside, I am happy that zig foundation gets such amount of money and I am really excited that Zig an independent language is able to get the level of love that it does.

There is a famous talk by the creator of Elm on the economics of independent programming languages and how its hard for them to get sponsored if they aren't already working at a company (Rust was created at Mozilla, Golang was created by Google)

This is a real issue that is true for most of open-source and I am just happy that we are atleast moving slowly towards some good as well. Its an uphill battle with multiple lows but I am happy for the positive changes as it gets as open source does have a special place in my heart as it taught me about privacy and many of your hearts as well.

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.

I applaud this, particularly as I view Zig as a viable alternative to rust for many applications. Do I think rust is a positive addition to the Linux kernel. Absolutely. Would I reach for rust or Zig first when I was implementing a real-time audio synthesizer if I had to choose between the two? Unless Rusteze, a Clojure dialect hosted on rust existed, I would choose Zig. I sense a hegemonic power growing behind rust, and I think we need to support a breadth of alternatives in how we invoke computation.

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)

do good and talk about post

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

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/

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

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.

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Doesn't this prove that Mitchell Hashimoto is probably the only "good billionaire"?

I thought all billionaires were bad?