37 ms·

I Quit My Job to Live on Donations to Zig

399 points by AndyKelley 8y ago

emodendroket 8y ago
I envy the kind of confidence that would lead someone to decide that a new programming language is their ticket to riches.
- gizmo 8y ago
  That's a little mean. The author writes: > 100% of donations I receive go towards paying rent, buying food, and generally attempting to live a modest, but healthy life. He doesn't expect to get rich from this.
  - rhacker 8y ago
    Even so, at some point if the language "takes off", a company out there may want to become a full-time sponsor. It's no riskier than a startup - and nicely bootstrapped with very low cost of maintaining it. Kinda awesome actually he's doing what his passion is.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  - amelius 8y ago
    Also, who was the last person getting rich from a programming language? Programming languages are more of an open-source thing. You can't make much money from them.
    - Boulth 8y ago
      Anders Hejlsberg got $1M for joining Microsoft: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Hejlsberg https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Hejlsberg
      - shabda 8y ago
        Which is hardly "getting rich" if you are as skilled as Anders Hejlsberg.
        klmr 8y ago
        I’m pretty sure Anders’ salary at Microsoft qualifies him being called rich.
        jaredsohn 8y ago
        I think the GP assumed that Anders was already rich before that so joining Microsoft didn't 'get him rich'. But if that was the case, based on his work history he may have still 'gotten rich' via programming languages, just from before Microsoft.
        gowld 8y ago
        I think GP is saying that $1M isn't enough money to "get rich", and furthermore isn't particularly "for creating a language", for someone who could easily make $200K-$1M working on whatever Microsoft wants. But GP forgot that the $1M was in 1997, before Google and Facebook and friends made non-founder engineers rich.
        emodendroket 8y ago
        Netscape?
      - noir_lord 8y ago
        To get the principal engineer behind the languages Turbo Pascal, Object Pascal (Delphi) and then C# and TypeScript that seems like the deal of the century if you factor the business value of all of the above.
        TimJYoung 8y ago
        Indeed, and at the time I was surprised that they got him for so little. There's so many design decisions in C# that resemble Object Pascal and Turbo Pascal, that it's pretty obvious that Anders=C# (not to take anything away from what are surely some of the best compiler engineers in the last few decades, I just don't know their names off-hand).
    - gradschool 8y ago
      I have a feeling some of the people involved with kx systems probably did well out of it. https://kx.com/about-kx/ https://kx.com/about-kx/
    - wolco 8y ago
      Open source can open many avenues of profit. I wonder what the creator of laravel makes with conferences, forge and paid support.
- sotojuan 8y ago
  Not only does he probably have a good amount of savings, he can easily get a new job if this experiment fails. It’s a gutsy move I’d never be able to do but not really something he can’t recover from.
  - asdfman123 8y ago
    Yeah, as a former senior engineer with a well known company, who took time off to develop his own programming language all he has to do is throw his resume into the recruiter feeding frenzy and immediately get a job. While it's admirable, I can't really say it's risky. Risky is quitting in a field where people stay laid off for like a year.
    - beagle3 8y ago
      It IS risky unless he has a cushion to fall on (lots of saving or trust fund). Life tends to pull out expensive rabbits out of hats, more of them as one gets older. At $1000/month, a broken or stolen laptop or bicycle is ~two months. In the US (which he is) Any medical issue, or a baby, is somewhere between three months and bankruptcy.
      - gowld 8y ago
        He's taking a sabbatical, not retiring permanently. Sure, he needs to have some money saved up.
      - asdfman123 8y ago
        Well, I assume he's going to be smart about it and have at least six months' income.
      - ChristianGeek 8y ago
        If he’s spending $2K on a bike then he’s not living a “modest” life.
        workinthehead 8y ago
- christophilus 8y ago
  Sounds more as if he thinks a new programming language might possibly be able to let him eke out a living while doing work he enjoys. No riches in sight, so far as my reading of it is concerned.
- star-castle 8y ago
  Reminds me of the fellow that took a year off to create an amazing new version control system. He made svk, which was pretty good except for being followed too closely by git. However good Zig looks, there's also Nim, ATS, Rust, and a dozen more. Seems like a good time for programming languages -- which means a dangerous time to quit your day job for one.
  - sincerely 8y ago
    realistically, i doubt the author would have trouble finding another job if this doesn’t pan out.
    - star-castle 8y ago
      I doubt that the svk guy had that problem either. His problem was, instead, "I took a year off work to produce a VCS and then saw the throne taken by git. My work has been forgotten and nobody uses it--not even me."
      - theyinwhy 8y ago
        That's the experience of 99.999% of all startups.
      - sincerely 8y ago
        Thanks for clarifying, I see what you're saying
- onion2k 8y ago
  ...to riches. There are riches besides money.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - emodendroket 8y ago
    Yes, but they end up being difficult to chase if you can't make rent or buy groceries.
    - onion2k 8y ago
      There's a big bit in the middle between "homeless and starving" and "actually rich".
      - emodendroket 8y ago
        Of course there is, but my point is I could not do this without an expectation of penury.
- zawerf 8y ago
  He's probably not going to get rich off patreon donations. The only developers that are doing well on patreon are being sponsored by real companies (or making adult games). For example vue.js has 100k github stars and the creator is still only getting 15k a month on patreon and a good chunk of that comes from only a small handful of $2000 tier company sponsors: https://graphtreon.com/creator/evanyou https://graphtreon.com/creator/evanyou. So that's probably a rough upperbound on how much the donation model can support.
  - workinthehead 8y ago
    _Only_ 15k/month? Sounds like a pretty epic deal to me, getting paid a very healthy salary to set your own hours and work on your baby.
- cmontella 8y ago
  As someone who writes programming languages, let me tell you that people who do so don't do it to get rich. We do it because we see great inefficiency in the world of systems that needs to be corrected. It's like people who are social justice activists. They're not getting rich either, but they're doing what needs to be done.
mnx 8y ago
Best of luck. Is there any place you wrote about why you belive Zig is better than all the other alternatives to C? Why should I look at Zig, insted of looking at Rust? Not trying to be dismissive, genuinely curious what your thinking is.
- AndyKelley 8y ago
  https://github.com/ziglang/zig/wiki/Why-Zig-When-There-is-Already-CPP%2C-D%2C-and-Rust%3F https://github.com/ziglang/zig/wiki/Why-Zig-When-There-is-Al...
pedrocr 8y ago
Has anyone tried Zig? From reading the project page I don't see anything that it has/plans over something like Rust that's much further along.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
  I write a lot of Zig. In fact, all my hobby projects are in Zig since I've started using it because I like it so much. I haven't tried Rust, but I've seen enough of it to know I'd hate it. Where Zig has a clear advantage is that it is vastly smaller and simpler and does not enforce a memory management paradigm on you. There isn't even a default allocator.
- striking 8y ago
  Rust seems like a spiritual successor to C++. Zig seems like a spiritual successor to C (except it's a little closer to C, as you can directly run things from C in Zig)
  - nicoburns 8y ago
    Came here to say the same thing. I think there is probably room for both. Seems like the are valid use cases where you might want something with completely manual management like C, but without footguns like undefined behaviour and c-style strings.
- gmfawcett 8y ago
  Error management is different, and quite uniquely done. Zig deals with failure modes in a much more fine-grained way than Rust, which favours the algebraic-wrapper approach (Result / Option types). If you're writing actual, low-level systems code, your code might need to react differently depending on the failure mode: you need to know if it was an I/O issue, or out-of-memory, or disk-full, or etc. At the call point, Zig lets you enumerate all of the possible failure reasons comprehensively, and handle each one specifically if you choose to. This enumeration is produced and checked by the compiler, so you can't miss any cases. (It also lets you disregard the specifics if you don't care.)
wlkr 8y ago
Looking for more on Zig I found a talk [0] (~1 hour) on the language by Andrew Kelley from just a few months ago. Edit: I see there already questions about Rust in this thread. There's an audience question on Rust in the talk [1] and the creator states that Rust is Zig's biggest competitor. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4oYSByyRak https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4oYSByyRak [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4oYSByyRak&feature=youtu.be&t=2602 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4oYSByyRak&feature=youtu.be...
- throwawayjava 8y ago
  IMO we're about to see a robotics renaissance. That embedded world needs a simple, performant, low-level language that isn't C. If Zig focuses on providing that for the robotics domain, I could see it becoming popular.
  - ionforce 8y ago
    What makes you think we're about to see a robotics renaissance?
    - stevehawk 8y ago
      Michael Bay's documentary Transformers
deleted 8y ago
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lixtra 8y ago
Do you see a niche you could conquer with zig? For ruby it was rails. Python profited from data science. Etc.
- jxub 8y ago
  Systems programming, I think? Also, much less complexity in the type system than Rust, one of the main new contenders along the old gang of C and C++.
carapace 8y ago
I want this to work so much (because this is exactly the "business model" by which I'd like to live.) I know of another example: the guy who draws and writes the web- (and now print too) comic "Kill Six Billion Demons". I believe he's currently living off of direct fan support (through Patreon too, as it happens) although he has published a physical book collecting the first arc of the story. (I guess that is also fan support..?)
- mratsim 8y ago
  In Asia, several dozens of authors are earning millions (in USD) by releasing chapters of novels on a daily basis. And English translators gets about ~$20-$100 per day from Patreon donations: Check - https://www.wuxiaworld.com/ (note that this is a very large community) - Earnings of Tang Jia San Shao and I Eat Tomatoes - Article on New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/01/world/asia/china-online-literature-zhang-wei.html
- egypturnash 8y ago
  Image published a couple of collections of K6BD. Which is a very different proposition from self-publishing - if you do it yourself you can expect to have to spend at least two or three months dealing with supply chain management, running a Kickstarter, and so on, instead of drawing more pages. And that’s assuming you don’t make any mistakes, there’s a lot of things to learn the hard way. There’s a lot of artists living off of Patreon. I got close near the end of my last graphic novel, but the Kickstarter was a big learning experience that took a while, the new one takes longer to draw and rent always goes up, not down. (And this is why there was so much screaming when Patreon tried to change their fee structure late last year.)
deleted 8y ago
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fbonetti 8y ago
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- Matthias247 8y ago
  Why? For some people traveling is their fulfillment of life. For other people it can be hacking, gaming, watching all TV shows that are on the planet, etc.
  - wolco 8y ago
    Living the drean then. Trying to get through everyshow this summer.
dexen 8y ago
I've looked at the guide[1] to writing Brainfuck interpreter, and the Zig language indeed looks very practical. In particular the test "..." {} block is neat, and the love for stack backtraces makes me feel at home. Definitely a language to keep an eye out on. [1] https://blog.jfo.click/how-zig-do/ https://blog.jfo.click/how-zig-do/
- jxub 8y ago
  I am curious whether it's inspired by Elixir's ExUnit test macro or the idea for that sprung up independently. Greatness is 99% transpiration nonetheless.
otras 8y ago
Having the courage to take the plunge is admirable, and that's enough to get $1/month from me. Congratulations on making such a big decision! One thing I'm curious about: the current ~$400/month from Patreon (minus fees) isn't close to enough to cover a similarly comfortable standard of living in New York, and I imagine that this would affect your "runway", if you will. Are you able to live and work off of savings, or will you be relocating for a lower cost of living? Apologies if this comes across as prying into your financial details. I'm more just curious about the process. Again, congrats!
- icebraining 8y ago
  He writes in Patreon that reaching $1000 will allow him to "work on Zig full-time for 3 times longer", so I'm guessing he's burning some savings and every extra dollar will just extend that for some time.
- iicc 8y ago
  The 3rd goal on https://www.patreon.com/andrewrk https://www.patreon.com/andrewrk is > $3,000 per month Fully sustain full-time work on Zig.
- AndyKelley 8y ago
  Thanks for the support :) As much as I love NYC, it may be practical to relocate somewhere with a lower cost of living. Alee & I will reevaluate when the lease is up. She's in grad school, so who knows where that will take her? I'll probably just live where she needs to for her career.
  - asdfman123 8y ago
    That's what I did. I used to work remotely and followed my now fiancee to Yakima, Washington. I saved so much money there...
  - ericabiz 8y ago
    Hey Andy, dev/ops nerd turned marketer here. First of all, AWESOME that you quit your job and are attempting to make a go at this! Huge congrats! I would recommend you put in a couple higher levels on the Patreon and think about what people would want from you. For instance, I ran a popular blog and asked my readers what they would pay monthly for. Turns out one of the biggest requests was just a private webinar (I hate that word, so you could call it something else, like "knowledge brain dump") once a week. I ran them for 60 or 90 minutes and took questions at the end. In fact, I may do this again in the future, since I continue to get requests for it long after the fact. People here have expressed how articulate you are when describing the language. Setting up a group at say $19/mo or even $49/mo where you deep dive into software dev, practical applications of Zig, and/or programming languages in general "live" once a week might be something people are willing to pay for, and would get you "out of the red" more quickly.
tc7 8y ago
Cool, good for you :). I like the world where the internet enables niche creators to live and engage with invested supporters/patrons. Aside, have you seen the language Jonathan Blow's working on (jai)? Curious how you'd compare the two, goals or implementation-wise. (Given he hasn't released anything yet, no worries if this is unanswerable :))
- slobotron 8y ago
  There is at least this comment in the docs: > Zig is taking cues from Jai's stance on allocators, since that language is being developed by a high-performance game designer for the usecase of high-performance games." https://github.com/ziglang/zig/wiki/Why-Zig-When-There-is-Already-CPP%2C-D%2C-and-Rust%3F#no-hidden-allocations https://github.com/ziglang/zig/wiki/Why-Zig-When-There-is-Al...
pseudonymcoward 8y ago
I think this may be exactly what I've been looking for. I've been wanting a "Better C" type of language, but all the existing candidates fall down on some point like - too complicated (Rust/D/C++), no manual memory management (Go), etc. I've even made some half baked attempts at writing my own language. It seems that the design goals of this language are exactly what I'm after. Going to have to give it a try later.
- ionforce 8y ago
  What part(s) of Rust do you find too complicated, and why?
  - oregontechninja 8y ago
    One place they're thinking of might be integration with C. zig's C integration is crazy good from what I can tell toying around with it. It was as easy as @cImport({@cInclude("header.h")}) The language is also evolving rapidly, this may have changed, but if it did, it probably changed for the better.
  - pseudonymcoward 8y ago
    In general I prefer languages to be small and simple - like Go and C. This doesn't seem to be a design goal for Rust, which puts me off. Some specifics: Trying to do anything non-trivial with ownership/lifetimes/borrowing always ends up in a tangle, fighting with the compiler. Everything in the stdlib seems to have a giant api with pages and pages of functions. Example: https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/string/struct.String.html https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/string/struct.String.html Scrolling down through those methods is overwhelming. The overhead imposed by the goal of maximising safety is big, and not that important to me (as I'm not writing Very Important Crypto code or whatever, I don't find it hard to write good enough code for my purposes in C).
    - deleted 8y ago
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    - julienfr112 8y ago
nsomaru 8y ago
People here are commenting that NYC is quite an expensive place to live off donations. I'm not sure what advantages that the location brings when working on a programming language (networking?), but I can suggest moving to South Africa where cost of living is low and quality of life is high. Yeah there's "crime" -- but it's not too bad as long as you're a little smart about the way you conduct yourself. Cape Town is an obvious first choice and is really cosmopolitan with a good dev community, but I can suggest Durban as a good runner up; it was recently voted "Most Livable City in South Africa" [0] For New York level "hole-in-a-wall" rentals, you can live like a king in South Africa :) If you're willing to share a spot you can really get a palace for yourself, and enjoy some of the best beaches in the world (in Durban). [0] https://www.iol.co.za/mercury/news/durban-is-most-liveable-city-in-south-africa-13963052 https://www.iol.co.za/mercury/news/durban-is-most-liveable-c...
- komali2 8y ago
  New Zealand is also making a big push to bring in tech workers, with some amiable visas. I see their immigration department at tech conferences all the time. From personal experience, I can tell you that Taiwan is a fantastic place as well. Lots of engineers, absurdly low cost of living for the civic amenities (which blow away even the best that San Francisco or New York can offer), and gorgeous nature if you're into that. If you manage to learn Mandarin it'll greatly expand your access to the programming community there, but if not there's plenty of English speakers and just expats.
  - jeffreyrogers 8y ago
    I was in Taiwan recently and it is a lovely country, but talking to some friends who work there (in non-tech jobs) they said there is a large brain drain to mainland China. Has this been your experience? I'd imagine salaries are substantially lower than what someone would make in the US, even after factoring in cost of living.
    - komali2 8y ago
      Speculation among my Taiwanese friends is that the "brain drain" rumor is raw propaganda from the PRC government. Very few Taiwanese people would give up the freedoms they have in Taiwan for a move to China, just because they might get paid more. There probably should be a (unbiased) study done, but it does not match my experience. Taiwan does get shitloads of Chinese people coming in to work, though. Taiwanese salaries are substantially lower, yes, especially for Taiwanese. Furthermore, they have an unhealthy, ineffective work culture reminiscent of Japan. These issues need to be worked out and it is a long term plan of mine to tackle this head on and very publicly when I start a business there. For expats, there's no need to participate in this work culture if you don't work at a majority Taiwanese company, and if you do work at such a company, you can simply annoy your coworkers by leaving at 5, you most likely won't be fired over it but will need to withstand peer pressure. Visibly Asian-heritage expats will experience this even more. The best case scenario is the one we're discussing in the main thread - expat working internationally, but remote.
overcast 8y ago
What's amazing to me is that he's sustaining living in NYC on currently $423 a month. He must be pulling from a pretty large savings fund. Even his "fully sustain working on zig" goal is only $3000. https://www.patreon.com/andrewrk/memberships https://www.patreon.com/andrewrk/memberships
- IshKebab 8y ago
  > What's amazing to me is that he's sustaining living in NYC on currently $423 a month. I don't think he is?
  - overcast 8y ago
    According to his Patreon I linked he is.
    - eanzenberg 8y ago
      That is.. quite impossible. He's living off additional savings or a mooch or homeless.
      - guildan 8y ago
        He answered that in another comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17257056 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17257056
- giarc 8y ago
  He mentions having a girlfriend, maybe they live together?
- koala_man 8y ago
  It was ~$350 when I looked at it this morning, $423 when you posted, and $569 now. If current trends continue... :P
- jpmoyn 8y ago
  Well the article makes it seem that he has only just begun doing this, and likely has savings from his job before quitting.
mikkqu 8y ago
Absolute awesomeness. I can't wait to see it to become next big thing!
maxtaco 8y ago
OKWS author here. I have to take some issue, we made a lot of improvements to the infrastructure over the years. The Tame system for instance was a big one. [1] [1] https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/usenix07/tech/full_papers/krohn/krohn.pdf https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/usenix07/tech/full_pape...
- AndyKelley 8y ago
  Hi Max! Amazing, I thought that tame was there since the beginning. BTW my "hack week" project was going to be replacing tame with cpp-coro [1] but I quit before hack week started. [1]: https://github.com/lewissbaker/cppcoro/ https://github.com/lewissbaker/cppcoro/
  - egwynn 8y ago
    Tame had only just been applied in earnest when I started in 2007. Pre-tame code was pretty unwieldy!
asdfman123 8y ago
There's a "take off every zig" joke in here somewhere. Take off from OkCupid, start every zig?
- stochastic_monk 8y ago
  I'll bite: kickstart every zig.
nstart 8y ago
For anyone like me who's hearing of Zig for the first time, I totally encourage y'all to watch the video that's attached on his Patreon page. It's rare to see a technical presentation done in a way where the concepts are so clearly understandable. Makes me want to take a peek into Zig and see what it's like in there and consider supporting the author just because. Hope it works out well enough for him to live his dream :).
- gota 8y ago
  I'm tempted to spend a good while studying Zig just because it says "Zig competes with C instead of depending on it" and folks here are not thrashing it ('Why compete with C at all?' would be my guess of general reaction)
  - jschwartzi 8y ago
    Based on what other posters are saying about the language design and the interface design, it's built in such a way that you don't have to do a ton of boilerplate to integrate Zig code with C/C++ projects. That, in turn, means that you can start new sections of your code base in Zig and gradually start eating your legacy C/C++ code until you have a project written in Zig instead of C. And it seems like it does this by not being too opinionated about your use of memory, unlike Rust. I would be really interested in using it if I had more Clang support in bare metal systems. I think the consensus among embedded developers is that we would all really, really like a modern language with modern type-safety and type-checking, but we also still want to do crazy crap with memory at times. It doesn't matter so much that there's a way to do something, but it matters a great deal how you are expected to do it. Keeping it simple matters, and Zig looks pretty simple compared to other compiled systems languages that I've seen, so that's wonderful.
    - AndyKelley 8y ago
      > you can start new sections of your code base in Zig and gradually start eating your legacy C/C++ code until you have a project written in Zig instead of C. http://tiehuis.github.io/iterative-replacement-of-c-with-zig http://tiehuis.github.io/iterative-replacement-of-c-with-zig
g4nt1 8y ago
Since Zig is pretty unknown language, I would actually buy swag. Cap/t-shirt. It's not like a monthly donation but if it can get you extra cash...
- djzidon 8y ago
  This is brilliant. Create a $10 tier to receive swag perhaps
oblio 8y ago
Andrew, if you're listening, add some higher thresholds on Patreon, you'd be surprised. Someone who's willing to give you money (any amount, even $1) is probably also willing to give you $5 or $10 (impulse spending, basically).
- DoreenMichele 8y ago
  He has 92 patrons giving him $596/month. Methinks you don't understand how Patreon works.
  - oblio 8y ago
    The link on his site says $1. I’d make the default $5.
    - boomlinde 8y ago
      I think the point is that the donors are already averaging at an amount much higher than $1 each.
  - quakeguy 8y ago
    Do you understand how Patreon works? He can always raise his pledge.
    - DoreenMichele 8y ago
      Some, enough to know that if it says "$1 pledge" that in no way limits the patron to only pledging a single dollar. If people are willing to give him more than that without him offering additional incentives, there is a downside to providing other levels in that there is administrative overhead on the back end to make sure people get the incentives they paid for and distinguish those who gave $5 without wanting other incentives from those who gave $5 because they did want those incentives. Etc If the point is to free up his time to focus on Zig, more pledge levels potentially distracts from that without necessarily increasing his take, given that the developer community is already willing to give him more than a dollar just to support letting him work on Zig, without anymore incentive to them than that.
joering2 8y ago
About donations, recently Twitter blow up with the story of Minister who lives in 35,000 square 25-rooms mansion, and asked for $54,000,000 donations for his fourth Jet [1]. Reasoning was that public planes are "tubes filled in with demons" that in the post "bothered [him] with their prayers". He also wrongly claimed that he needs new jet so he flies without stopping anywhere to refuel as the gas prices are high... altho everyone flying private jets know jet fuel is cheaper almost everywhere outside of US. His "apology" video is worth watching [2] ... his office is literally dripping with gold; the Eggs on his desk are $4,000 per piece. Given recent price of pound of rice, one of those eggs will get you 12,000 pounds (!!!) of raw rice. It takes approx 0.8 pound of rice to feed one person per day. 12,000 / 0.8 gives you 15,000 days worth of rice for one person, or 41 years. One Egg! [2] Anyways the point of my story is that if in first world country like USA you can find people gullible enough to buy stories like this one and keep on living in literally liquid luxury for 40 years (like that minister does), then it doesn't surprised me someone quit job, begs people for donation and actually makes a solid living. [1] https://www.cnn.com/2018/05/30/us/jesse-duplantis-plane-falcon-7x-prosperity-gospel-trnd/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2018/05/30/us/jesse-duplantis-plane-falc... [2] http://www.jdm.org/xw-partnerupdate.aspx?source=TWITTER http://www.jdm.org/xw-partnerupdate.aspx?source=TWITTER PS. Oh and while you on your donations spree, you don't have to be transparent; here Jesse Jets beacon is off; not only he doesn't fly with peasants like you and me, he doesn't want you to know where he is "burning the Jet for Lord Jesus": https://flightaware.com/live/flight/N770JD https://flightaware.com/live/flight/N770JD
- egeozcan 8y ago
  If he sells a luxury item to feed people, another person has to buy it. If everyone would rather sell such an item to feed people, its price would drop to 0.
- antiquitie 8y ago
  There's no "story" here. The guy has written a real piece of software. You can download it and try it yourself. If you like his work (many of us do) you can tip him a small donation, barely even beer money, to show your appreciation. It's kind of silly to act like this is some sort of scam.
nickdrozd 8y ago
Here's a story about Andy. Two years ago, I was writing a modest Lisp interpreter in C. The evaluator was more or less working, but I was totally stuck on parsing user input (in other words, I had the E in REPL, but not the R). After spending an entire night banging my head against the parsing logic without making any progress, I began to despair that it would never work and I would have to throw the whole thing in the trash. Well, that morning I met Andy. Groggy and frustrated, I told him about my problem. He said "Why don't you try tokenizing the input before parsing it?" This was a revelation to me. Yes, it turns out that reading a string character by character and trying to recursively convert it into a Lisp object all at once isn't the best way to do it. Who knew (aside from anyone who had ever learned anything about parsing)? The resulting parser code: https://github.com/nickdrozd/lispinc/blob/master/parse.c https://github.com/nickdrozd/lispinc/blob/master/parse.c Anyway, I don't know anything about Zig, but Andy sure helped me out of that jam.
ddtaylor 8y ago
What exactly are people getting for their $1/mo? We have a donation page on our website that we send to people who ask but we haven't taken the plunge to exposing it yet out of fear of backlash.
- cbluth 8y ago
  Try "softening the blow" by selling a limited line of $SOME_PRODUCT_OR_SERVICE and releasing a donation page at the same time... And retain the donation page once the limited supply runs dry.
- wolco 8y ago
  Supporting someone or an idea they believe in.
make3 8y ago
[deleted]
- DC-3 8y ago
  It's still a nice story. If nothing else, we learn he's helpful. Some who are knowledgable about PLT and compiler design would've sneered and said 'go read the Dragon Book'.
- fataliss 8y ago
  that he isn't a d*ck and made fun of him cause that was "compiler 101", but helped a brother out!
  - xcccc 8y ago
    Sure, but it's in the same category as "Fred Brooks was so nice to a stranger and showed him the way" (true story, I think). 90% of people are like that.
  - ythn 8y ago
    I hate this elitism attitude people have like everyone should have taken a 101 for every topic in the universe. If all bugs are shallow given enough eyes, all problems are "X 101" problems given enough people. "So and so helped me fix a hard problem" "Isn't that just [problem category] 101?"
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
- phaemon 8y ago
  In agreement with the others, it tells us that he isn't the kind of ass who would say, "isn't that like compilers 101 stuff".
- CameronBanga 8y ago
  That he's good enough to not bash on people when they need help. And instead help solve problems while also inspiring.
fataliss 8y ago
Props to you buddy! Glad people like you are always willing to take risks to move the software community forward. Whether it works out or not, I give you my thumbs up!
jbschirtzinger 8y ago
I run a small church. It's pretty much the same idea, except for YHVH.
jjnoakes 8y ago
I would love to see zig compile to C so I can use it on platforms which clang/llvm do not support.
- mrec 8y ago
  I'd think it would make sense to do this as an LLVM backend so that everyone could use it. This used to exist [1], but I don't think it's maintained, which suggests there wasn't much demand for it. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12279770 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12279770
olejorgenb 8y ago
He also have a liberapay account: https://liberapay.com/andrewrk/ https://liberapay.com/andrewrk/
makecheck 8y ago
There’s a huge positive-feedback-loop problem in technology right now that needs to be solved to make projects viable. Never received even one donation/rating/comment/etc.? Be prepared to wait approximately forever. Got a few, especially publicly-visible? Suddenly things trickle in faster. Well-known project with 5000 stars? Here, have more stars. Here, have more donations. Success breeds success. Meanwhile, wasn’t it shown that crucial infrastructure like SSL had between 1-2 unknown developers? How many other projects are there? How many developers can you name? How many different projects have you donated to? How many “not well known” apps have you balked at paying even $0.99 for? It’s a problem. There needs to be better ways to vault critical “boring” projects into the well-known category. And, there has to be a way to keep positive feedback loops from ballooning ratings and income for projects simply because they sorted to the top and stayed there.
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  > There’s a huge positive-feedback-loop problem in technology right now that needs to be solved to make projects viable. > Never received even one donation/rating/comment/etc.? Be prepared to wait approximately forever. > Got a few, especially publicly-visible? Suddenly things trickle in faster. That's not tech specific; there's a reason that places with tip jars preseed them with an initial stash of visible tips, and advertising (for consumer products, charity, and even B2B productos) features endorsers known to the target audience. Human social behavior is strongly based in imitation.
  - makecheck 8y ago
    The tech-specific differences are things like: - Compared to setting up a coffee stand, it can take years to build really good technical solutions. (Longer, if you actually care and put in “invisible” effort like making it not crash or delete data regularly.) Yet, that app can still be lumped in with all the rest in the begging-for-scraps models of many monetization schemes. - Unlike a coffee shop, where you can probably assume some amount of traffic and tips on a regular basis, software is often firmly set at ZERO. Or negative, if you consider any other cost. There isn’t a “software neighborhood” where people might walk by and see your project alongside only a couple others in the area. - Unlike any “natural” recognition in the real world, tech projects are recognized in entirely unnatural ways. No one may know about an app for months; yet if/when knowledge finally spreads, the message is generally LOUD and everywhere. Say, being featured in the App Store: you go from “never heard of it” to “almost everyone in the world with an iPhone who checked top-10 lists this week”. That is far, far beyond the reach of normal ads, and also insane: it pretty much guarantees over-rewarding and under-rewarding developers across the board.
eipi-1 8y ago
I adore the purity with which Andy is approaching his projects. After watching the "Software Should be Perfect" video I looked around in his GitHub account [0] and found groovebasin. I realized that 3 years ago I was amazed by that same attitude in his "Quest to Build the Ultimate Music Player" [1]. I find it very hard to keep up that kind of purism in the corporate world. Even as a Co-Founder with a lot of decision-making authority, I often feel the need to favor pragmatism over purism. Andy, I wish you the best of luck to succeed in your quest to sustain a living, while keeping up the perfectionism. BTW: I happened to have crashed the groovebasin demo back in 2015. In an email you explained that my playlist import triggered an out of memory process crash. Maybe its time to rewrite the groovebasin backend in Zig to make it more robust in high memory usage situations ;) [0] https://github.com/andrewrk https://github.com/andrewrk [1] https://andrewkelley.me/post/quest-build-ultimate-music-player.html https://andrewkelley.me/post/quest-build-ultimate-music-play...
zeth___ 8y ago
I've been shat on HN before for saying this but I stand by it: you're not a programmer/developer/"whatever it's called now" until you have done a parser for something at least as complicated as lisp in whatever the lex/yacc equivalent is in your language of choice. The difference between people who get regular languages, pretty much everyone who codes, and the people who get context free grammars is more than $100k a year.
- athesyn 8y ago
  I don't understand, are you saying that writing a language parser is a litmus test that that only real programmers can pass? What makes it so special compared to other tasks of similar difficulty?
  - zeth___ 8y ago
    Parsing is the fundamental task of programming: taking information, performing a transformation on it, passing it along. If you can't do it you might use computers but you're not programming. Tuning DE solvers might take as much skill, or more, than getting context free string parsed, but it's not a skill that is used outside of numerical computing. DBAs aren't called programmers for a reason, but they are no less valuable for it. The same applies for every niche skill that takes years to develop.
    - athesyn 8y ago
      >The same applies for every niche skill that takes years to develop. so you just defeated your own argument, instead of hyper-focusing on writing parser why not just say "years of experience" if that is what really matters? no wonder you got shit on.
      - zeth___ 8y ago
        If you spend decades being a better juggler you won't be a better programmer, the same is true for all the meta-programming jobs.
    - 8y ago
chis 8y ago
Hey op your andrewkelley.me/donate link is broken! might wanna look into that.
woodaroo 8y ago
Hi Andy! Wanted to let you know that I appreciate the niche you're exploring. Pledged on patreon. Keep up the good work. Please do consider the comments suggesting a periodic video / podcast/ etc., that would allow you to share your process. Thanks!
niftylettuce 8y ago
Go kick some butt man. - Nifty
fouc 8y ago
Zig, or making a better C sounds like a genius idea. C is so enormously successful that a better C could be huge.
garfieldnate 8y ago
Eh, it says he's getting $720 per month? Won't last long on that...

399 points by AndyKelley 8y ago

I envy the kind of confidence that would lead someone to decide that a new programming language is their ticket to riches.

gizmo 8y ago
That's a little mean. The author writes: > 100% of donations I receive go towards paying rent, buying food, and generally attempting to live a modest, but healthy life. He doesn't expect to get rich from this.
- rhacker 8y ago
  Even so, at some point if the language "takes off", a company out there may want to become a full-time sponsor. It's no riskier than a startup - and nicely bootstrapped with very low cost of maintaining it. Kinda awesome actually he's doing what his passion is.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- amelius 8y ago
  Also, who was the last person getting rich from a programming language? Programming languages are more of an open-source thing. You can't make much money from them.
  - Boulth 8y ago
    Anders Hejlsberg got $1M for joining Microsoft: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Hejlsberg https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Hejlsberg
    - shabda 8y ago
      Which is hardly "getting rich" if you are as skilled as Anders Hejlsberg.
      - klmr 8y ago
        I’m pretty sure Anders’ salary at Microsoft qualifies him being called rich.
        jaredsohn 8y ago
        I think the GP assumed that Anders was already rich before that so joining Microsoft didn't 'get him rich'. But if that was the case, based on his work history he may have still 'gotten rich' via programming languages, just from before Microsoft.
        gowld 8y ago
        I think GP is saying that $1M isn't enough money to "get rich", and furthermore isn't particularly "for creating a language", for someone who could easily make $200K-$1M working on whatever Microsoft wants. But GP forgot that the $1M was in 1997, before Google and Facebook and friends made non-founder engineers rich.
        emodendroket 8y ago
        Netscape?
    - noir_lord 8y ago
      To get the principal engineer behind the languages Turbo Pascal, Object Pascal (Delphi) and then C# and TypeScript that seems like the deal of the century if you factor the business value of all of the above.
      - TimJYoung 8y ago
        Indeed, and at the time I was surprised that they got him for so little. There's so many design decisions in C# that resemble Object Pascal and Turbo Pascal, that it's pretty obvious that Anders=C# (not to take anything away from what are surely some of the best compiler engineers in the last few decades, I just don't know their names off-hand).
  - gradschool 8y ago
    I have a feeling some of the people involved with kx systems probably did well out of it. https://kx.com/about-kx/ https://kx.com/about-kx/
  - wolco 8y ago
    Open source can open many avenues of profit. I wonder what the creator of laravel makes with conferences, forge and paid support.
sotojuan 8y ago
Not only does he probably have a good amount of savings, he can easily get a new job if this experiment fails. It’s a gutsy move I’d never be able to do but not really something he can’t recover from.
- asdfman123 8y ago
  Yeah, as a former senior engineer with a well known company, who took time off to develop his own programming language all he has to do is throw his resume into the recruiter feeding frenzy and immediately get a job. While it's admirable, I can't really say it's risky. Risky is quitting in a field where people stay laid off for like a year.
  - beagle3 8y ago
    It IS risky unless he has a cushion to fall on (lots of saving or trust fund). Life tends to pull out expensive rabbits out of hats, more of them as one gets older. At $1000/month, a broken or stolen laptop or bicycle is ~two months. In the US (which he is) Any medical issue, or a baby, is somewhere between three months and bankruptcy.
    - gowld 8y ago
      He's taking a sabbatical, not retiring permanently. Sure, he needs to have some money saved up.
    - asdfman123 8y ago
      Well, I assume he's going to be smart about it and have at least six months' income.
    - ChristianGeek 8y ago
      If he’s spending $2K on a bike then he’s not living a “modest” life.
      - workinthehead 8y ago
christophilus 8y ago
Sounds more as if he thinks a new programming language might possibly be able to let him eke out a living while doing work he enjoys. No riches in sight, so far as my reading of it is concerned.
star-castle 8y ago
Reminds me of the fellow that took a year off to create an amazing new version control system. He made svk, which was pretty good except for being followed too closely by git. However good Zig looks, there's also Nim, ATS, Rust, and a dozen more. Seems like a good time for programming languages -- which means a dangerous time to quit your day job for one.
- sincerely 8y ago
  realistically, i doubt the author would have trouble finding another job if this doesn’t pan out.
  - star-castle 8y ago
    I doubt that the svk guy had that problem either. His problem was, instead, "I took a year off work to produce a VCS and then saw the throne taken by git. My work has been forgotten and nobody uses it--not even me."
    - theyinwhy 8y ago
      That's the experience of 99.999% of all startups.
    - sincerely 8y ago
      Thanks for clarifying, I see what you're saying
onion2k 8y ago
...to riches. There are riches besides money.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- emodendroket 8y ago
  Yes, but they end up being difficult to chase if you can't make rent or buy groceries.
  - onion2k 8y ago
    There's a big bit in the middle between "homeless and starving" and "actually rich".
    - emodendroket 8y ago
      Of course there is, but my point is I could not do this without an expectation of penury.
zawerf 8y ago
He's probably not going to get rich off patreon donations. The only developers that are doing well on patreon are being sponsored by real companies (or making adult games). For example vue.js has 100k github stars and the creator is still only getting 15k a month on patreon and a good chunk of that comes from only a small handful of $2000 tier company sponsors: https://graphtreon.com/creator/evanyou https://graphtreon.com/creator/evanyou. So that's probably a rough upperbound on how much the donation model can support.
- workinthehead 8y ago
  _Only_ 15k/month? Sounds like a pretty epic deal to me, getting paid a very healthy salary to set your own hours and work on your baby.
cmontella 8y ago
As someone who writes programming languages, let me tell you that people who do so don't do it to get rich. We do it because we see great inefficiency in the world of systems that needs to be corrected. It's like people who are social justice activists. They're not getting rich either, but they're doing what needs to be done.

mnx 8y ago

Best of luck. Is there any place you wrote about why you belive Zig is better than all the other alternatives to C? Why should I look at Zig, insted of looking at Rust? Not trying to be dismissive, genuinely curious what your thinking is.

AndyKelley 8y ago
https://github.com/ziglang/zig/wiki/Why-Zig-When-There-is-Already-CPP%2C-D%2C-and-Rust%3F https://github.com/ziglang/zig/wiki/Why-Zig-When-There-is-Al...

pedrocr 8y ago

Has anyone tried Zig? From reading the project page I don't see anything that it has/plans over something like Rust that's much further along.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
I write a lot of Zig. In fact, all my hobby projects are in Zig since I've started using it because I like it so much. I haven't tried Rust, but I've seen enough of it to know I'd hate it. Where Zig has a clear advantage is that it is vastly smaller and simpler and does not enforce a memory management paradigm on you. There isn't even a default allocator.
striking 8y ago
Rust seems like a spiritual successor to C++. Zig seems like a spiritual successor to C (except it's a little closer to C, as you can directly run things from C in Zig)
- nicoburns 8y ago
  Came here to say the same thing. I think there is probably room for both. Seems like the are valid use cases where you might want something with completely manual management like C, but without footguns like undefined behaviour and c-style strings.
gmfawcett 8y ago
Error management is different, and quite uniquely done. Zig deals with failure modes in a much more fine-grained way than Rust, which favours the algebraic-wrapper approach (Result / Option types). If you're writing actual, low-level systems code, your code might need to react differently depending on the failure mode: you need to know if it was an I/O issue, or out-of-memory, or disk-full, or etc. At the call point, Zig lets you enumerate all of the possible failure reasons comprehensively, and handle each one specifically if you choose to. This enumeration is produced and checked by the compiler, so you can't miss any cases. (It also lets you disregard the specifics if you don't care.)

wlkr 8y ago

Looking for more on Zig I found a talk [0] (~1 hour) on the language by Andrew Kelley from just a few months ago. Edit: I see there already questions about Rust in this thread. There's an audience question on Rust in the talk [1] and the creator states that Rust is Zig's biggest competitor. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4oYSByyRak https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4oYSByyRak [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4oYSByyRak&feature=youtu.be&t=2602 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4oYSByyRak&feature=youtu.be...

throwawayjava 8y ago
IMO we're about to see a robotics renaissance. That embedded world needs a simple, performant, low-level language that isn't C. If Zig focuses on providing that for the robotics domain, I could see it becoming popular.
- ionforce 8y ago
  What makes you think we're about to see a robotics renaissance?
  - stevehawk 8y ago
    Michael Bay's documentary Transformers

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

lixtra 8y ago

Do you see a niche you could conquer with zig? For ruby it was rails. Python profited from data science. Etc.

jxub 8y ago
Systems programming, I think? Also, much less complexity in the type system than Rust, one of the main new contenders along the old gang of C and C++.

carapace 8y ago

I want this to work so much (because this is exactly the "business model" by which I'd like to live.) I know of another example: the guy who draws and writes the web- (and now print too) comic "Kill Six Billion Demons". I believe he's currently living off of direct fan support (through Patreon too, as it happens) although he has published a physical book collecting the first arc of the story. (I guess that is also fan support..?)

mratsim 8y ago
In Asia, several dozens of authors are earning millions (in USD) by releasing chapters of novels on a daily basis. And English translators gets about ~$20-$100 per day from Patreon donations: Check - https://www.wuxiaworld.com/ (note that this is a very large community) - Earnings of Tang Jia San Shao and I Eat Tomatoes - Article on New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/01/world/asia/china-online-literature-zhang-wei.html
egypturnash 8y ago
Image published a couple of collections of K6BD. Which is a very different proposition from self-publishing - if you do it yourself you can expect to have to spend at least two or three months dealing with supply chain management, running a Kickstarter, and so on, instead of drawing more pages. And that’s assuming you don’t make any mistakes, there’s a lot of things to learn the hard way. There’s a lot of artists living off of Patreon. I got close near the end of my last graphic novel, but the Kickstarter was a big learning experience that took a while, the new one takes longer to draw and rent always goes up, not down. (And this is why there was so much screaming when Patreon tried to change their fee structure late last year.)

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

fbonetti 8y ago

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Matthias247 8y ago
Why? For some people traveling is their fulfillment of life. For other people it can be hacking, gaming, watching all TV shows that are on the planet, etc.
- wolco 8y ago
  Living the drean then. Trying to get through everyshow this summer.

dexen 8y ago

I've looked at the guide[1] to writing Brainfuck interpreter, and the Zig language indeed looks very practical. In particular the test "..." {} block is neat, and the love for stack backtraces makes me feel at home. Definitely a language to keep an eye out on. [1] https://blog.jfo.click/how-zig-do/ https://blog.jfo.click/how-zig-do/

jxub 8y ago
I am curious whether it's inspired by Elixir's ExUnit test macro or the idea for that sprung up independently. Greatness is 99% transpiration nonetheless.

otras 8y ago

Having the courage to take the plunge is admirable, and that's enough to get $1/month from me. Congratulations on making such a big decision! One thing I'm curious about: the current ~$400/month from Patreon (minus fees) isn't close to enough to cover a similarly comfortable standard of living in New York, and I imagine that this would affect your "runway", if you will. Are you able to live and work off of savings, or will you be relocating for a lower cost of living? Apologies if this comes across as prying into your financial details. I'm more just curious about the process. Again, congrats!

icebraining 8y ago
He writes in Patreon that reaching $1000 will allow him to "work on Zig full-time for 3 times longer", so I'm guessing he's burning some savings and every extra dollar will just extend that for some time.
iicc 8y ago
The 3rd goal on https://www.patreon.com/andrewrk https://www.patreon.com/andrewrk is > $3,000 per month Fully sustain full-time work on Zig.
AndyKelley 8y ago
Thanks for the support :) As much as I love NYC, it may be practical to relocate somewhere with a lower cost of living. Alee & I will reevaluate when the lease is up. She's in grad school, so who knows where that will take her? I'll probably just live where she needs to for her career.
- asdfman123 8y ago
  That's what I did. I used to work remotely and followed my now fiancee to Yakima, Washington. I saved so much money there...
- ericabiz 8y ago
  Hey Andy, dev/ops nerd turned marketer here. First of all, AWESOME that you quit your job and are attempting to make a go at this! Huge congrats! I would recommend you put in a couple higher levels on the Patreon and think about what people would want from you. For instance, I ran a popular blog and asked my readers what they would pay monthly for. Turns out one of the biggest requests was just a private webinar (I hate that word, so you could call it something else, like "knowledge brain dump") once a week. I ran them for 60 or 90 minutes and took questions at the end. In fact, I may do this again in the future, since I continue to get requests for it long after the fact. People here have expressed how articulate you are when describing the language. Setting up a group at say $19/mo or even $49/mo where you deep dive into software dev, practical applications of Zig, and/or programming languages in general "live" once a week might be something people are willing to pay for, and would get you "out of the red" more quickly.

tc7 8y ago

Cool, good for you :). I like the world where the internet enables niche creators to live and engage with invested supporters/patrons. Aside, have you seen the language Jonathan Blow's working on (jai)? Curious how you'd compare the two, goals or implementation-wise. (Given he hasn't released anything yet, no worries if this is unanswerable :))

slobotron 8y ago
There is at least this comment in the docs: > Zig is taking cues from Jai's stance on allocators, since that language is being developed by a high-performance game designer for the usecase of high-performance games." https://github.com/ziglang/zig/wiki/Why-Zig-When-There-is-Already-CPP%2C-D%2C-and-Rust%3F#no-hidden-allocations https://github.com/ziglang/zig/wiki/Why-Zig-When-There-is-Al...

pseudonymcoward 8y ago

I think this may be exactly what I've been looking for. I've been wanting a "Better C" type of language, but all the existing candidates fall down on some point like - too complicated (Rust/D/C++), no manual memory management (Go), etc. I've even made some half baked attempts at writing my own language. It seems that the design goals of this language are exactly what I'm after. Going to have to give it a try later.

ionforce 8y ago
What part(s) of Rust do you find too complicated, and why?
- oregontechninja 8y ago
  One place they're thinking of might be integration with C. zig's C integration is crazy good from what I can tell toying around with it. It was as easy as @cImport({@cInclude("header.h")}) The language is also evolving rapidly, this may have changed, but if it did, it probably changed for the better.
- pseudonymcoward 8y ago
  In general I prefer languages to be small and simple - like Go and C. This doesn't seem to be a design goal for Rust, which puts me off. Some specifics: Trying to do anything non-trivial with ownership/lifetimes/borrowing always ends up in a tangle, fighting with the compiler. Everything in the stdlib seems to have a giant api with pages and pages of functions. Example: https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/string/struct.String.html https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/string/struct.String.html Scrolling down through those methods is overwhelming. The overhead imposed by the goal of maximising safety is big, and not that important to me (as I'm not writing Very Important Crypto code or whatever, I don't find it hard to write good enough code for my purposes in C).
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - julienfr112 8y ago

nsomaru 8y ago

People here are commenting that NYC is quite an expensive place to live off donations. I'm not sure what advantages that the location brings when working on a programming language (networking?), but I can suggest moving to South Africa where cost of living is low and quality of life is high. Yeah there's "crime" -- but it's not too bad as long as you're a little smart about the way you conduct yourself. Cape Town is an obvious first choice and is really cosmopolitan with a good dev community, but I can suggest Durban as a good runner up; it was recently voted "Most Livable City in South Africa" [0] For New York level "hole-in-a-wall" rentals, you can live like a king in South Africa :) If you're willing to share a spot you can really get a palace for yourself, and enjoy some of the best beaches in the world (in Durban). [0] https://www.iol.co.za/mercury/news/durban-is-most-liveable-city-in-south-africa-13963052 https://www.iol.co.za/mercury/news/durban-is-most-liveable-c...

komali2 8y ago
New Zealand is also making a big push to bring in tech workers, with some amiable visas. I see their immigration department at tech conferences all the time. From personal experience, I can tell you that Taiwan is a fantastic place as well. Lots of engineers, absurdly low cost of living for the civic amenities (which blow away even the best that San Francisco or New York can offer), and gorgeous nature if you're into that. If you manage to learn Mandarin it'll greatly expand your access to the programming community there, but if not there's plenty of English speakers and just expats.
- jeffreyrogers 8y ago
  I was in Taiwan recently and it is a lovely country, but talking to some friends who work there (in non-tech jobs) they said there is a large brain drain to mainland China. Has this been your experience? I'd imagine salaries are substantially lower than what someone would make in the US, even after factoring in cost of living.
  - komali2 8y ago
    Speculation among my Taiwanese friends is that the "brain drain" rumor is raw propaganda from the PRC government. Very few Taiwanese people would give up the freedoms they have in Taiwan for a move to China, just because they might get paid more. There probably should be a (unbiased) study done, but it does not match my experience. Taiwan does get shitloads of Chinese people coming in to work, though. Taiwanese salaries are substantially lower, yes, especially for Taiwanese. Furthermore, they have an unhealthy, ineffective work culture reminiscent of Japan. These issues need to be worked out and it is a long term plan of mine to tackle this head on and very publicly when I start a business there. For expats, there's no need to participate in this work culture if you don't work at a majority Taiwanese company, and if you do work at such a company, you can simply annoy your coworkers by leaving at 5, you most likely won't be fired over it but will need to withstand peer pressure. Visibly Asian-heritage expats will experience this even more. The best case scenario is the one we're discussing in the main thread - expat working internationally, but remote.

overcast 8y ago

What's amazing to me is that he's sustaining living in NYC on currently $423 a month. He must be pulling from a pretty large savings fund. Even his "fully sustain working on zig" goal is only $3000. https://www.patreon.com/andrewrk/memberships https://www.patreon.com/andrewrk/memberships

IshKebab 8y ago
> What's amazing to me is that he's sustaining living in NYC on currently $423 a month. I don't think he is?
- overcast 8y ago
  According to his Patreon I linked he is.
  - eanzenberg 8y ago
    That is.. quite impossible. He's living off additional savings or a mooch or homeless.
    - guildan 8y ago
      He answered that in another comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17257056 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17257056
giarc 8y ago
He mentions having a girlfriend, maybe they live together?
koala_man 8y ago
It was ~$350 when I looked at it this morning, $423 when you posted, and $569 now. If current trends continue... :P
jpmoyn 8y ago
Well the article makes it seem that he has only just begun doing this, and likely has savings from his job before quitting.

mikkqu 8y ago

Absolute awesomeness. I can't wait to see it to become next big thing!

maxtaco 8y ago

OKWS author here. I have to take some issue, we made a lot of improvements to the infrastructure over the years. The Tame system for instance was a big one. [1] [1] https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/usenix07/tech/full_papers/krohn/krohn.pdf https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/usenix07/tech/full_pape...

AndyKelley 8y ago
Hi Max! Amazing, I thought that tame was there since the beginning. BTW my "hack week" project was going to be replacing tame with cpp-coro [1] but I quit before hack week started. [1]: https://github.com/lewissbaker/cppcoro/ https://github.com/lewissbaker/cppcoro/
- egwynn 8y ago
  Tame had only just been applied in earnest when I started in 2007. Pre-tame code was pretty unwieldy!

asdfman123 8y ago

There's a "take off every zig" joke in here somewhere. Take off from OkCupid, start every zig?

stochastic_monk 8y ago
I'll bite: kickstart every zig.

nstart 8y ago

For anyone like me who's hearing of Zig for the first time, I totally encourage y'all to watch the video that's attached on his Patreon page. It's rare to see a technical presentation done in a way where the concepts are so clearly understandable. Makes me want to take a peek into Zig and see what it's like in there and consider supporting the author just because. Hope it works out well enough for him to live his dream :).

gota 8y ago
I'm tempted to spend a good while studying Zig just because it says "Zig competes with C instead of depending on it" and folks here are not thrashing it ('Why compete with C at all?' would be my guess of general reaction)
- jschwartzi 8y ago
  Based on what other posters are saying about the language design and the interface design, it's built in such a way that you don't have to do a ton of boilerplate to integrate Zig code with C/C++ projects. That, in turn, means that you can start new sections of your code base in Zig and gradually start eating your legacy C/C++ code until you have a project written in Zig instead of C. And it seems like it does this by not being too opinionated about your use of memory, unlike Rust. I would be really interested in using it if I had more Clang support in bare metal systems. I think the consensus among embedded developers is that we would all really, really like a modern language with modern type-safety and type-checking, but we also still want to do crazy crap with memory at times. It doesn't matter so much that there's a way to do something, but it matters a great deal how you are expected to do it. Keeping it simple matters, and Zig looks pretty simple compared to other compiled systems languages that I've seen, so that's wonderful.
  - AndyKelley 8y ago
    > you can start new sections of your code base in Zig and gradually start eating your legacy C/C++ code until you have a project written in Zig instead of C. http://tiehuis.github.io/iterative-replacement-of-c-with-zig http://tiehuis.github.io/iterative-replacement-of-c-with-zig

g4nt1 8y ago

Since Zig is pretty unknown language, I would actually buy swag. Cap/t-shirt. It's not like a monthly donation but if it can get you extra cash...

djzidon 8y ago
This is brilliant. Create a $10 tier to receive swag perhaps

oblio 8y ago

Andrew, if you're listening, add some higher thresholds on Patreon, you'd be surprised. Someone who's willing to give you money (any amount, even $1) is probably also willing to give you $5 or $10 (impulse spending, basically).

DoreenMichele 8y ago
He has 92 patrons giving him $596/month. Methinks you don't understand how Patreon works.
- oblio 8y ago
  The link on his site says $1. I’d make the default $5.
  - boomlinde 8y ago
    I think the point is that the donors are already averaging at an amount much higher than $1 each.
- quakeguy 8y ago
  Do you understand how Patreon works? He can always raise his pledge.
  - DoreenMichele 8y ago
    Some, enough to know that if it says "$1 pledge" that in no way limits the patron to only pledging a single dollar. If people are willing to give him more than that without him offering additional incentives, there is a downside to providing other levels in that there is administrative overhead on the back end to make sure people get the incentives they paid for and distinguish those who gave $5 without wanting other incentives from those who gave $5 because they did want those incentives. Etc If the point is to free up his time to focus on Zig, more pledge levels potentially distracts from that without necessarily increasing his take, given that the developer community is already willing to give him more than a dollar just to support letting him work on Zig, without anymore incentive to them than that.

joering2 8y ago

About donations, recently Twitter blow up with the story of Minister who lives in 35,000 square 25-rooms mansion, and asked for $54,000,000 donations for his fourth Jet [1]. Reasoning was that public planes are "tubes filled in with demons" that in the post "bothered [him] with their prayers". He also wrongly claimed that he needs new jet so he flies without stopping anywhere to refuel as the gas prices are high... altho everyone flying private jets know jet fuel is cheaper almost everywhere outside of US. His "apology" video is worth watching [2] ... his office is literally dripping with gold; the Eggs on his desk are $4,000 per piece. Given recent price of pound of rice, one of those eggs will get you 12,000 pounds (!!!) of raw rice. It takes approx 0.8 pound of rice to feed one person per day. 12,000 / 0.8 gives you 15,000 days worth of rice for one person, or 41 years. One Egg! [2] Anyways the point of my story is that if in first world country like USA you can find people gullible enough to buy stories like this one and keep on living in literally liquid luxury for 40 years (like that minister does), then it doesn't surprised me someone quit job, begs people for donation and actually makes a solid living. [1] https://www.cnn.com/2018/05/30/us/jesse-duplantis-plane-falcon-7x-prosperity-gospel-trnd/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2018/05/30/us/jesse-duplantis-plane-falc... [2] http://www.jdm.org/xw-partnerupdate.aspx?source=TWITTER http://www.jdm.org/xw-partnerupdate.aspx?source=TWITTER PS. Oh and while you on your donations spree, you don't have to be transparent; here Jesse Jets beacon is off; not only he doesn't fly with peasants like you and me, he doesn't want you to know where he is "burning the Jet for Lord Jesus": https://flightaware.com/live/flight/N770JD https://flightaware.com/live/flight/N770JD

egeozcan 8y ago
If he sells a luxury item to feed people, another person has to buy it. If everyone would rather sell such an item to feed people, its price would drop to 0.
antiquitie 8y ago
There's no "story" here. The guy has written a real piece of software. You can download it and try it yourself. If you like his work (many of us do) you can tip him a small donation, barely even beer money, to show your appreciation. It's kind of silly to act like this is some sort of scam.

nickdrozd 8y ago

Here's a story about Andy. Two years ago, I was writing a modest Lisp interpreter in C. The evaluator was more or less working, but I was totally stuck on parsing user input (in other words, I had the E in REPL, but not the R). After spending an entire night banging my head against the parsing logic without making any progress, I began to despair that it would never work and I would have to throw the whole thing in the trash. Well, that morning I met Andy. Groggy and frustrated, I told him about my problem. He said "Why don't you try tokenizing the input before parsing it?" This was a revelation to me. Yes, it turns out that reading a string character by character and trying to recursively convert it into a Lisp object all at once isn't the best way to do it. Who knew (aside from anyone who had ever learned anything about parsing)? The resulting parser code: https://github.com/nickdrozd/lispinc/blob/master/parse.c https://github.com/nickdrozd/lispinc/blob/master/parse.c Anyway, I don't know anything about Zig, but Andy sure helped me out of that jam.

ddtaylor 8y ago

What exactly are people getting for their $1/mo? We have a donation page on our website that we send to people who ask but we haven't taken the plunge to exposing it yet out of fear of backlash.

cbluth 8y ago
Try "softening the blow" by selling a limited line of $SOME_PRODUCT_OR_SERVICE and releasing a donation page at the same time... And retain the donation page once the limited supply runs dry.
wolco 8y ago
Supporting someone or an idea they believe in.

make3 8y ago

[deleted]

DC-3 8y ago
It's still a nice story. If nothing else, we learn he's helpful. Some who are knowledgable about PLT and compiler design would've sneered and said 'go read the Dragon Book'.
fataliss 8y ago
that he isn't a d*ck and made fun of him cause that was "compiler 101", but helped a brother out!
- xcccc 8y ago
  Sure, but it's in the same category as "Fred Brooks was so nice to a stranger and showed him the way" (true story, I think). 90% of people are like that.
- ythn 8y ago
  I hate this elitism attitude people have like everyone should have taken a 101 for every topic in the universe. If all bugs are shallow given enough eyes, all problems are "X 101" problems given enough people. "So and so helped me fix a hard problem" "Isn't that just [problem category] 101?"
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
phaemon 8y ago
In agreement with the others, it tells us that he isn't the kind of ass who would say, "isn't that like compilers 101 stuff".
CameronBanga 8y ago
That he's good enough to not bash on people when they need help. And instead help solve problems while also inspiring.

fataliss 8y ago

Props to you buddy! Glad people like you are always willing to take risks to move the software community forward. Whether it works out or not, I give you my thumbs up!

jbschirtzinger 8y ago

I run a small church. It's pretty much the same idea, except for YHVH.

jjnoakes 8y ago

I would love to see zig compile to C so I can use it on platforms which clang/llvm do not support.

mrec 8y ago
I'd think it would make sense to do this as an LLVM backend so that everyone could use it. This used to exist [1], but I don't think it's maintained, which suggests there wasn't much demand for it. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12279770 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12279770

olejorgenb 8y ago

He also have a liberapay account: https://liberapay.com/andrewrk/ https://liberapay.com/andrewrk/

makecheck 8y ago

There’s a huge positive-feedback-loop problem in technology right now that needs to be solved to make projects viable. Never received even one donation/rating/comment/etc.? Be prepared to wait approximately forever. Got a few, especially publicly-visible? Suddenly things trickle in faster. Well-known project with 5000 stars? Here, have more stars. Here, have more donations. Success breeds success. Meanwhile, wasn’t it shown that crucial infrastructure like SSL had between 1-2 unknown developers? How many other projects are there? How many developers can you name? How many different projects have you donated to? How many “not well known” apps have you balked at paying even $0.99 for? It’s a problem. There needs to be better ways to vault critical “boring” projects into the well-known category. And, there has to be a way to keep positive feedback loops from ballooning ratings and income for projects simply because they sorted to the top and stayed there.

dragonwriter 8y ago
> There’s a huge positive-feedback-loop problem in technology right now that needs to be solved to make projects viable. > Never received even one donation/rating/comment/etc.? Be prepared to wait approximately forever. > Got a few, especially publicly-visible? Suddenly things trickle in faster. That's not tech specific; there's a reason that places with tip jars preseed them with an initial stash of visible tips, and advertising (for consumer products, charity, and even B2B productos) features endorsers known to the target audience. Human social behavior is strongly based in imitation.
- makecheck 8y ago
  The tech-specific differences are things like: - Compared to setting up a coffee stand, it can take years to build really good technical solutions. (Longer, if you actually care and put in “invisible” effort like making it not crash or delete data regularly.) Yet, that app can still be lumped in with all the rest in the begging-for-scraps models of many monetization schemes. - Unlike a coffee shop, where you can probably assume some amount of traffic and tips on a regular basis, software is often firmly set at ZERO. Or negative, if you consider any other cost. There isn’t a “software neighborhood” where people might walk by and see your project alongside only a couple others in the area. - Unlike any “natural” recognition in the real world, tech projects are recognized in entirely unnatural ways. No one may know about an app for months; yet if/when knowledge finally spreads, the message is generally LOUD and everywhere. Say, being featured in the App Store: you go from “never heard of it” to “almost everyone in the world with an iPhone who checked top-10 lists this week”. That is far, far beyond the reach of normal ads, and also insane: it pretty much guarantees over-rewarding and under-rewarding developers across the board.

eipi-1 8y ago

I adore the purity with which Andy is approaching his projects. After watching the "Software Should be Perfect" video I looked around in his GitHub account [0] and found groovebasin. I realized that 3 years ago I was amazed by that same attitude in his "Quest to Build the Ultimate Music Player" [1]. I find it very hard to keep up that kind of purism in the corporate world. Even as a Co-Founder with a lot of decision-making authority, I often feel the need to favor pragmatism over purism. Andy, I wish you the best of luck to succeed in your quest to sustain a living, while keeping up the perfectionism. BTW: I happened to have crashed the groovebasin demo back in 2015. In an email you explained that my playlist import triggered an out of memory process crash. Maybe its time to rewrite the groovebasin backend in Zig to make it more robust in high memory usage situations ;) [0] https://github.com/andrewrk https://github.com/andrewrk [1] https://andrewkelley.me/post/quest-build-ultimate-music-player.html https://andrewkelley.me/post/quest-build-ultimate-music-play...

zeth___ 8y ago

I've been shat on HN before for saying this but I stand by it: you're not a programmer/developer/"whatever it's called now" until you have done a parser for something at least as complicated as lisp in whatever the lex/yacc equivalent is in your language of choice. The difference between people who get regular languages, pretty much everyone who codes, and the people who get context free grammars is more than $100k a year.

athesyn 8y ago
I don't understand, are you saying that writing a language parser is a litmus test that that only real programmers can pass? What makes it so special compared to other tasks of similar difficulty?
- zeth___ 8y ago
  Parsing is the fundamental task of programming: taking information, performing a transformation on it, passing it along. If you can't do it you might use computers but you're not programming. Tuning DE solvers might take as much skill, or more, than getting context free string parsed, but it's not a skill that is used outside of numerical computing. DBAs aren't called programmers for a reason, but they are no less valuable for it. The same applies for every niche skill that takes years to develop.
  - athesyn 8y ago
    >The same applies for every niche skill that takes years to develop. so you just defeated your own argument, instead of hyper-focusing on writing parser why not just say "years of experience" if that is what really matters? no wonder you got shit on.
    - zeth___ 8y ago
      If you spend decades being a better juggler you won't be a better programmer, the same is true for all the meta-programming jobs.
  - 8y ago

chis 8y ago

Hey op your andrewkelley.me/donate link is broken! might wanna look into that.

woodaroo 8y ago

Hi Andy! Wanted to let you know that I appreciate the niche you're exploring. Pledged on patreon. Keep up the good work. Please do consider the comments suggesting a periodic video / podcast/ etc., that would allow you to share your process. Thanks!

niftylettuce 8y ago

Go kick some butt man. - Nifty

fouc 8y ago

Zig, or making a better C sounds like a genius idea. C is so enormously successful that a better C could be huge.

garfieldnate 8y ago

Eh, it says he's getting $720 per month? Won't last long on that...