9 ms·

Announcing The Zig Software Foundation

263 points by kristoff_it 6y ago

dleslie 6y ago
Well this is exciting. The biggest risk of Zig, among many risks, seemed to me to be that it was a one-individual show and so privy to their whims and subject to their ongoing interest and availability. Seeing an organization created with the intent to foster its development is a step in the right direction.
- InitEnabler 6y ago
  I mean its not anything different than PHP, Nim, Ruby, etc in terms of a one man show. Even so its nice to have a org like this for Zig, might even make me to try it out.
  - dleslie 6y ago
    PHP and Ruby both have many community contributors, and deep-pocketed corporate supporters. Nim has less of this, but still has a healthy community of contributors and users.
  - svnpenn 6y ago
    https://lwn.net/Articles/821821 https://lwn.net/Articles/821821
kristoff_it 6y ago
The show is live here: https://zig.show https://zig.show
rurban 6y ago
So this is all for tax purposes, that sponsors can deduct their payments, and Andrew doesn't have to pay VAT on his income?
- pixelherodev 6y ago
  Yes. That is clearly exactly what is going on here. It's all about money. That's why the blog post explicitly talked about how focusing on money is a mistake.
- ifreund 6y ago
  No, this is to make the transition from a one-man show into a sustainable organization.
  - rurban 6y ago
    The organization bits came with >1000 issues, needing more committers. Now there are 8 committers and 1200 issues. And probably a dev list to handle internal issues. I don't see the need for a financial organization, other than my arguments. Sustainability is much better without another entity interfering.
- zengid 6y ago
  No it's to make sure donors know that the money they give will have a legal obligation to be used to achieve the mission statement of the organization.
ddevault 6y ago
Congrats! This looks like it has been done well. Good news for Zig and I hope it sets a good example for other organizations to follow.
hirundo 6y ago
> When I worked at a publicly traded dating website, female users were known internally as "inventory". It makes sense from a certain perspective, if your primary focus is extracting value from paying customers. But when your motto is "together we serve the users", it would be ridiculous to imagine something so inhumane. To me, this is the crux of the issue. I’ve never been more motivated in my life, than to serve the community around me, and help people accomplish their own goals. "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest." - Adam Smith It's great that you're motivated by helping people. Sincerely. But most people aren't built that way. We get up on Monday morning to make a small circle of precious lives better, not just anyone's. Maybe it shouldn't be that way, but it is. Therefore reorganizing society around service rather than profit likely means a much smaller economy. To many people that's a feature.
- bluejekyll 6y ago
  Just because it’s a non-profit, doesn’t mean the folks working for it won’t make money and have decent lives. In fact the post pretty clearly states that as a desired goal, “Part of the goal of the ZSF is to provide excellent jobs that make people happy to work, and leave them financially well off, as well as having gained the kind of work experience that they wish to invest in for their own careers.” Now the question I have, is it possible to create recurring revenue at a non-profit that is based of contracts with customers, or must all the revenue come from donations?
  - OldHand2018 6y ago
    > is it possible to create recurring revenue at a non-profit that is based of contracts with customers Sure. I once worked at a non-profit that provided educational material to schools on a subscription basis. There is a line somewhere, as eventually the non-profit starting providing additional services to those same schools that required them to keep a second set of books and pay taxes on those activities.
  - O_H_E 6y ago
    > is it possible to create recurring revenue at a non-profit that is based of contracts with customers? Yes definitely. The main difference from for-profits is that the revenue have to be spent towards the mission and not blindly creating more profit.
banachtarski 6y ago
Maybe an unpopular opinion among Zig programmers, but the lack of operator overloading is/was the true buzzkill for me as someone that tends to do a lot of math/science work in C and C++ both. Getting operators in C++ is one of the biggest productivity boosts compared to when I work in C.
- vanderZwan 6y ago
  I think it's fine to say why Zig doesn't work for you as long as you make it clear what the limitation is and why, and don't use that as an argument to say it's a bad language - just a bad fit for your particular use-case. Out of curiosity, aren't there other languages designed with more appropriate expressiveness for your needs then? Julia, for example?
  - banachtarski 6y ago
    C++ is actually the sweet spot for expressiveness and complete control needed for the work I do on consoles and embedded devices. I was excited for zig because in many respects it really does feel like a better C, but I think philosophically, it’s more oriented around building particular types of systems. Disclaimer, I’ve sunk only about 35 hours into Zig so it’s possible it would be different with more experience but that’s about all the time I can realistically afford for a trial run of a new technology these days.
    - meheleventyone 6y ago
      Personally having done a bunch of mathy things both ways you get used to expressing thing without overloading. On balance I would opt for overloading because it feels natural to me but it’s a niggle rather than anything serious.
- olodus 6y ago
  I can understand the annoying part of it if that is the way you would do it elsewhere. Don't you feel that it would to some degree go against zig's goal of as little hidden control flow as possible? And wouldn't it be possible to create something very close to what you are asking for with a bit of comptime coding? Have the function work on a comptime decided type. I mean I get that you won't be able to use the operator symbols as names and you would lose infix syntax. Is those what you are after?
CyberDildonics 6y ago
Now that there are multiple people, I wonder if they will fold in the separate program needed to parse tabs and carriage returns.
- gmcabrita 6y ago
  > The Zig language accepts hard tabs and carriage returns. The self-hosted compiler implements the Zig language correctly; accepting hard tabs and carriage returns. However, the self-hosted compiler is not yet complete, and what people are using in reality is the stage1 compiler, which does not accept hard tabs. https://github.com/ziglang/zig/wiki/FAQ#why-does-zig-force-me-to-use-spaces-instead-of-tabs https://github.com/ziglang/zig/wiki/FAQ#why-does-zig-force-m...
  - CyberDildonics 6y ago
    That seems to imply that zig is only right now being used to make the self hosted compiler.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
- YorickPeterse 6y ago
  Something tells me Zig developers have more important matters to focus on than being able to indent code with tabs.
  - CyberDildonics 6y ago
    They already made a formatting tool that parses carriage returns and tabs. It's not exactly rocket science to not fail on tabs and carriage returns either.
    - YorickPeterse 6y ago
      Instead of complaining about in on Hacker News, how about you try to submit a patch to make it work? That strikes me as far more productive.
ksec 6y ago
Anyone following Zig knows how far away is it from 1.0?
- schroffl 6y ago
  You can see the planned releases in the milestones on GitHub: https://github.com/ziglang/zig/milestones https://github.com/ziglang/zig/milestones I would say at least two more years then.
0xTJ 6y ago
I'm looking forward to Zig getting better. I tried writing an x86 OS in it, but some 0.6.0 known compiler bugs (I think it was some union-related stuff) broke what I was trying to do. I think it's supposed to be fixed in 0.7.0, so I'm waiting for that.
daotoad 6y ago
Take off every 'ZIG'!! You know what you doing. Move 'ZIG'. For great justice!
meheleventyone 6y ago
This is great Zig is one of the projects I think has a real future and have enjoyed programming in. In terms of languages for the web with WASM I think it has massive advantages over Rust. I love that it’s gaining traction and only wish I had more spare time to actually help out.
- eklavya 6y ago
  > In terms of languages for the web with WASM I think it has massive advantages over Rust. Can you please elaborate what are those?
  - flohofwoe 6y ago
    Not the OP, but I have the same opinion (I think): Zig being better than Rust for targeting WASM is similar to C being better than C++ for that use case. High-level abstractions usually work against a minimal binary size, and WASM is a platform where the size of the 'executable' is very important. Both C and Zig typically generate smaller binaries 'by default' by avoiding and discouraging high-level abstractions which are so fashionable now both in 'modern C++' and Rust. Of course it is possible to create really small-sized binaries both in C++ and Rust if you're really careful and use an "embedded programming mindset", but this is not how those languages are taught, it's not the 'default' and you'll loose most of the high-level features that differentiate C++ and Rust from C or Zig anyway. I wrote a blog post about that topic a while ago: https://floooh.github.io/2018/05/01/cpp-to-c-size-reduction.html https://floooh.github.io/2018/05/01/cpp-to-c-size-reduction.... This was when I just switched from using C++ to C as my 'default language', so that whole idea was quite new to me at the time, and that surprise is reflected in the blog post. In the meantime I have a better idea why higher level languages tend to cause bloated software, despite promising "zero cost abstractions".
PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
When I looked into starting an official non-profit around the Ardour (https://ardour.org/ https://ardour.org/) project, I was a little disappointed to find out how much success made it much more complicated. Founding a non-profit that deals with less than about US$10k a year is pretty easy, and seems worthwhile. Go above that number (let alone up towards the levels where you can actually pay people to work full time on somethine), and you need a real board with real officers, and the board needs board insurance to imdemnify them against charges of financial malfeasance. That was just the first complication I came across. After finding a couple more, I just gave up. I've love to have a "real" non-profit associated with Ardour, since that's entirely the way we conceive of the project, but the legal aspects to it when you're actually pulling in $100k a year or more just don't seem to justify the extra complications and requirements.
- zachlatta 6y ago
  You might be interested in Hack Club Bank (https://hackclub.com/bank/ https://hackclub.com/bank/), which we built for our students at Hack Club after they kept having the same problem (but with smaller amounts of money). Today there are hundreds of student orgs running on Hack Club Bank, a few larger orgs (one with a budget of ~$100K/year, one that just signed on with anticipated budget of $1M/year), and now Hack Club HQ itself runs on Hack Club Bank (our finances are also open source on it - https://bank.hackclub.com/hq/ https://bank.hackclub.com/hq/). While the page on Hack Club Bank on our website is still focused on student-led hackathons, we've recently started support for nonprofits not led by students. Perhaps it might be a good fit for Ardour?
- weinzierl 6y ago
  Have you considered registering your foundation in another country? For example The Document Foundation - the non-profit organization behind Libre Office - is legally registered in Germany. Here is what Florian Effenberger the foundation's Executive Director had to say about the decision to register in Germany in an interview in 2011 (my translation): "You have decided to establish the Document Foundation in Germany. Why should it become a foundation under German law? A lot of people have asked whether it is necessary to establish the Document Foundation in Germany, because such a large amount of foundation capital is required here. In contrast, countries such as Great Britain or the United States offer similar legal constructs for a foundation without the requirement for a high foundation capital. The Steering Committee, after a thorough investigation, decided in a public telephone conference that the location of registration of the future foundation should ideally be Germany. Germany is the best choice for the future foundation for several reasons: Not only do German foundations stand for security, stability, and trustworthiness, but Germany also has a large distribution of free and open source software. The roots of the product lie in Germany in the mid-1980s. In addition, Germany offers advantages in terms of taxes, tax deductibility for donors, as well as in terms of the foundation's activities, which are not restricted to a specific country from Germany. Most importantly, many active members of the community who are willing to advance the Foundation are from Germany. Even if other countries would require fewer resources to set up the Foundation - if people who are willing to advance the Foundation are not on site, there would be higher costs for representatives and lawyers. Ultimately, however, a solid financial basis for the foundation would also be required in other countries." Original source of the interview in German: https://ikhaya.ubuntuusers.de/2011/03/10/interview-mit-der-document-foundation/ https://ikhaya.ubuntuusers.de/2011/03/10/interview-mit-der-d...
JakeCohen 6y ago
Seems like this new organization is used as a soapbox for the founder. I.e. a way to satisfy his ego by disproving the economic/cultural status quo. It’s foolish to tie up his technical project in with his idealistic crackpot social theories. one, he’s likely wrong, two, he’s alienating a ton of technical talent who think differently from him.
cassepipe 6y ago
Can't wait for 1.0 to come out. I love the pointer syntax. I think it is a good idea to keep the C type annotation as it has become standard and for use, the dot notation is really less confusing for beginners.
scared2 6y ago
Yet another programming syntax

263 points by kristoff_it 6y ago

Well this is exciting. The biggest risk of Zig, among many risks, seemed to me to be that it was a one-individual show and so privy to their whims and subject to their ongoing interest and availability. Seeing an organization created with the intent to foster its development is a step in the right direction.

InitEnabler 6y ago
I mean its not anything different than PHP, Nim, Ruby, etc in terms of a one man show. Even so its nice to have a org like this for Zig, might even make me to try it out.
- dleslie 6y ago
  PHP and Ruby both have many community contributors, and deep-pocketed corporate supporters. Nim has less of this, but still has a healthy community of contributors and users.
- svnpenn 6y ago
  https://lwn.net/Articles/821821 https://lwn.net/Articles/821821

kristoff_it 6y ago

The show is live here: https://zig.show https://zig.show

rurban 6y ago

So this is all for tax purposes, that sponsors can deduct their payments, and Andrew doesn't have to pay VAT on his income?

pixelherodev 6y ago
Yes. That is clearly exactly what is going on here. It's all about money. That's why the blog post explicitly talked about how focusing on money is a mistake.
ifreund 6y ago
No, this is to make the transition from a one-man show into a sustainable organization.
- rurban 6y ago
  The organization bits came with >1000 issues, needing more committers. Now there are 8 committers and 1200 issues. And probably a dev list to handle internal issues. I don't see the need for a financial organization, other than my arguments. Sustainability is much better without another entity interfering.
zengid 6y ago
No it's to make sure donors know that the money they give will have a legal obligation to be used to achieve the mission statement of the organization.

ddevault 6y ago

Congrats! This looks like it has been done well. Good news for Zig and I hope it sets a good example for other organizations to follow.

hirundo 6y ago

> When I worked at a publicly traded dating website, female users were known internally as "inventory". It makes sense from a certain perspective, if your primary focus is extracting value from paying customers. But when your motto is "together we serve the users", it would be ridiculous to imagine something so inhumane. To me, this is the crux of the issue. I’ve never been more motivated in my life, than to serve the community around me, and help people accomplish their own goals. "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest." - Adam Smith It's great that you're motivated by helping people. Sincerely. But most people aren't built that way. We get up on Monday morning to make a small circle of precious lives better, not just anyone's. Maybe it shouldn't be that way, but it is. Therefore reorganizing society around service rather than profit likely means a much smaller economy. To many people that's a feature.

bluejekyll 6y ago
Just because it’s a non-profit, doesn’t mean the folks working for it won’t make money and have decent lives. In fact the post pretty clearly states that as a desired goal, “Part of the goal of the ZSF is to provide excellent jobs that make people happy to work, and leave them financially well off, as well as having gained the kind of work experience that they wish to invest in for their own careers.” Now the question I have, is it possible to create recurring revenue at a non-profit that is based of contracts with customers, or must all the revenue come from donations?
- OldHand2018 6y ago
  > is it possible to create recurring revenue at a non-profit that is based of contracts with customers Sure. I once worked at a non-profit that provided educational material to schools on a subscription basis. There is a line somewhere, as eventually the non-profit starting providing additional services to those same schools that required them to keep a second set of books and pay taxes on those activities.
- O_H_E 6y ago
  > is it possible to create recurring revenue at a non-profit that is based of contracts with customers? Yes definitely. The main difference from for-profits is that the revenue have to be spent towards the mission and not blindly creating more profit.

banachtarski 6y ago

Maybe an unpopular opinion among Zig programmers, but the lack of operator overloading is/was the true buzzkill for me as someone that tends to do a lot of math/science work in C and C++ both. Getting operators in C++ is one of the biggest productivity boosts compared to when I work in C.

vanderZwan 6y ago
I think it's fine to say why Zig doesn't work for you as long as you make it clear what the limitation is and why, and don't use that as an argument to say it's a bad language - just a bad fit for your particular use-case. Out of curiosity, aren't there other languages designed with more appropriate expressiveness for your needs then? Julia, for example?
- banachtarski 6y ago
  C++ is actually the sweet spot for expressiveness and complete control needed for the work I do on consoles and embedded devices. I was excited for zig because in many respects it really does feel like a better C, but I think philosophically, it’s more oriented around building particular types of systems. Disclaimer, I’ve sunk only about 35 hours into Zig so it’s possible it would be different with more experience but that’s about all the time I can realistically afford for a trial run of a new technology these days.
  - meheleventyone 6y ago
    Personally having done a bunch of mathy things both ways you get used to expressing thing without overloading. On balance I would opt for overloading because it feels natural to me but it’s a niggle rather than anything serious.
olodus 6y ago
I can understand the annoying part of it if that is the way you would do it elsewhere. Don't you feel that it would to some degree go against zig's goal of as little hidden control flow as possible? And wouldn't it be possible to create something very close to what you are asking for with a bit of comptime coding? Have the function work on a comptime decided type. I mean I get that you won't be able to use the operator symbols as names and you would lose infix syntax. Is those what you are after?

CyberDildonics 6y ago

Now that there are multiple people, I wonder if they will fold in the separate program needed to parse tabs and carriage returns.

gmcabrita 6y ago
> The Zig language accepts hard tabs and carriage returns. The self-hosted compiler implements the Zig language correctly; accepting hard tabs and carriage returns. However, the self-hosted compiler is not yet complete, and what people are using in reality is the stage1 compiler, which does not accept hard tabs. https://github.com/ziglang/zig/wiki/FAQ#why-does-zig-force-me-to-use-spaces-instead-of-tabs https://github.com/ziglang/zig/wiki/FAQ#why-does-zig-force-m...
- CyberDildonics 6y ago
  That seems to imply that zig is only right now being used to make the self hosted compiler.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
YorickPeterse 6y ago
Something tells me Zig developers have more important matters to focus on than being able to indent code with tabs.
- CyberDildonics 6y ago
  They already made a formatting tool that parses carriage returns and tabs. It's not exactly rocket science to not fail on tabs and carriage returns either.
  - YorickPeterse 6y ago
    Instead of complaining about in on Hacker News, how about you try to submit a patch to make it work? That strikes me as far more productive.

ksec 6y ago

Anyone following Zig knows how far away is it from 1.0?

schroffl 6y ago
You can see the planned releases in the milestones on GitHub: https://github.com/ziglang/zig/milestones https://github.com/ziglang/zig/milestones I would say at least two more years then.

0xTJ 6y ago

I'm looking forward to Zig getting better. I tried writing an x86 OS in it, but some 0.6.0 known compiler bugs (I think it was some union-related stuff) broke what I was trying to do. I think it's supposed to be fixed in 0.7.0, so I'm waiting for that.

daotoad 6y ago

Take off every 'ZIG'!! You know what you doing. Move 'ZIG'. For great justice!

meheleventyone 6y ago

This is great Zig is one of the projects I think has a real future and have enjoyed programming in. In terms of languages for the web with WASM I think it has massive advantages over Rust. I love that it’s gaining traction and only wish I had more spare time to actually help out.

eklavya 6y ago
> In terms of languages for the web with WASM I think it has massive advantages over Rust. Can you please elaborate what are those?
- flohofwoe 6y ago
  Not the OP, but I have the same opinion (I think): Zig being better than Rust for targeting WASM is similar to C being better than C++ for that use case. High-level abstractions usually work against a minimal binary size, and WASM is a platform where the size of the 'executable' is very important. Both C and Zig typically generate smaller binaries 'by default' by avoiding and discouraging high-level abstractions which are so fashionable now both in 'modern C++' and Rust. Of course it is possible to create really small-sized binaries both in C++ and Rust if you're really careful and use an "embedded programming mindset", but this is not how those languages are taught, it's not the 'default' and you'll loose most of the high-level features that differentiate C++ and Rust from C or Zig anyway. I wrote a blog post about that topic a while ago: https://floooh.github.io/2018/05/01/cpp-to-c-size-reduction.html https://floooh.github.io/2018/05/01/cpp-to-c-size-reduction.... This was when I just switched from using C++ to C as my 'default language', so that whole idea was quite new to me at the time, and that surprise is reflected in the blog post. In the meantime I have a better idea why higher level languages tend to cause bloated software, despite promising "zero cost abstractions".

PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago

When I looked into starting an official non-profit around the Ardour (https://ardour.org/ https://ardour.org/) project, I was a little disappointed to find out how much success made it much more complicated. Founding a non-profit that deals with less than about US$10k a year is pretty easy, and seems worthwhile. Go above that number (let alone up towards the levels where you can actually pay people to work full time on somethine), and you need a real board with real officers, and the board needs board insurance to imdemnify them against charges of financial malfeasance. That was just the first complication I came across. After finding a couple more, I just gave up. I've love to have a "real" non-profit associated with Ardour, since that's entirely the way we conceive of the project, but the legal aspects to it when you're actually pulling in $100k a year or more just don't seem to justify the extra complications and requirements.

zachlatta 6y ago
You might be interested in Hack Club Bank (https://hackclub.com/bank/ https://hackclub.com/bank/), which we built for our students at Hack Club after they kept having the same problem (but with smaller amounts of money). Today there are hundreds of student orgs running on Hack Club Bank, a few larger orgs (one with a budget of ~$100K/year, one that just signed on with anticipated budget of $1M/year), and now Hack Club HQ itself runs on Hack Club Bank (our finances are also open source on it - https://bank.hackclub.com/hq/ https://bank.hackclub.com/hq/). While the page on Hack Club Bank on our website is still focused on student-led hackathons, we've recently started support for nonprofits not led by students. Perhaps it might be a good fit for Ardour?
weinzierl 6y ago
Have you considered registering your foundation in another country? For example The Document Foundation - the non-profit organization behind Libre Office - is legally registered in Germany. Here is what Florian Effenberger the foundation's Executive Director had to say about the decision to register in Germany in an interview in 2011 (my translation): "You have decided to establish the Document Foundation in Germany. Why should it become a foundation under German law? A lot of people have asked whether it is necessary to establish the Document Foundation in Germany, because such a large amount of foundation capital is required here. In contrast, countries such as Great Britain or the United States offer similar legal constructs for a foundation without the requirement for a high foundation capital. The Steering Committee, after a thorough investigation, decided in a public telephone conference that the location of registration of the future foundation should ideally be Germany. Germany is the best choice for the future foundation for several reasons: Not only do German foundations stand for security, stability, and trustworthiness, but Germany also has a large distribution of free and open source software. The roots of the product lie in Germany in the mid-1980s. In addition, Germany offers advantages in terms of taxes, tax deductibility for donors, as well as in terms of the foundation's activities, which are not restricted to a specific country from Germany. Most importantly, many active members of the community who are willing to advance the Foundation are from Germany. Even if other countries would require fewer resources to set up the Foundation - if people who are willing to advance the Foundation are not on site, there would be higher costs for representatives and lawyers. Ultimately, however, a solid financial basis for the foundation would also be required in other countries." Original source of the interview in German: https://ikhaya.ubuntuusers.de/2011/03/10/interview-mit-der-document-foundation/ https://ikhaya.ubuntuusers.de/2011/03/10/interview-mit-der-d...

JakeCohen 6y ago

Seems like this new organization is used as a soapbox for the founder. I.e. a way to satisfy his ego by disproving the economic/cultural status quo. It’s foolish to tie up his technical project in with his idealistic crackpot social theories. one, he’s likely wrong, two, he’s alienating a ton of technical talent who think differently from him.

cassepipe 6y ago

Can't wait for 1.0 to come out. I love the pointer syntax. I think it is a good idea to keep the C type annotation as it has become standard and for use, the dot notation is really less confusing for beginners.

scared2 6y ago

Yet another programming syntax