12 ms·

Pledging another $400k to the Zig software foundation

810 points by tosh 4mo ago

ksdme9 4mo ago
It must be pretty satisfying to be able to throw that kind of money at stuff you admire.
- cyber_kinetist 4mo ago
  I really do not understand how people talk about "Being rich / being a billionaire will make you fundamentally unhappy". Damn if I had all the money I have so many good-willed projects I want to throw money at!
  - epolanski 4mo ago
    Yet most wealthy people don't act like that. The wealthiest man on the planet looks to be quite miserable, insecure and bitter most of the time.
  - Daishiman 4mo ago
    Because the most vocal rich people in this age seem to have an unusual lack of empathy and just being able to enjoy themselves.
    - InsideOutSanta 4mo ago
      Yeah, I think people have the correlation backward. I suspect that driven people are more likely to get rich and less likely to be happy, so there seem to be a lot of angry rich dudes. Meanwhile, people who get rich by accident often seem able to improve their own lives and those of others with their money. The recent article about the founder of Craigslist comes to mind.
      - toomuchtodo 4mo ago
        Nailed it.
      - yard2010 4mo ago
        I wonder what is better, for people, for society, having many rich angry people or having many poor angry people?
        InsideOutSanta 4mo ago
        How about let's aim for neither ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
      - SoftTalker 4mo ago
        People who get rich by accident (e.g. lottery winners) typically spend it all and end up back where they started. Money is hard to hold on to for people who are unsophisticated about money. Predators and grifters come out of the woodwork to take a lot of it, and the rest gets frittered away on trinkets.
        InsideOutSanta 4mo ago
        So they did improve the lives of the people around them.
  - IshKebab 4mo ago
    Yeah I feel the same about people who say they wouldn't know what to do when they retire. I have so many projects! I guess we are just different...
  - darren0 4mo ago
    It will not make you unhappy. It will just not make you happy. Big difference. The saying "money can't buy happiness" is in fact true no matter how much people want to rationalize the opposite.
    - Herbstluft 4mo ago
      What that always leaves out, however, is that no/little money can very much cause a lot of unhappiness.
      - bluGill 4mo ago
        The amount of money to get over that hump is small. Many people in poverty are happy. If you are at the very bottom with not enough to eat and such money can buy happiness, but you can be below the poverty line and still be about as happy as everyone.
        SoftTalker 4mo ago
        This is a lie that people with money tell themselves to make themselves feel better about not giving away more of their money (ironically, proving themselves correct). There's certainly a point of diminishing returns, and I'd even agree that it is a cliff. Once you have a decent place to live, and your day-to-day worries about paying the bills are covered, and unexpected emergencies do not threaten your ability to get to work, keep your job, and pay your rent, then for most people more money has a diminishing impact on happiness. But that amount of money is quite a bit more than the poverty line.
        ff317 4mo ago
        Quite a bit indeed. Forbes ran an article a few months ago claiming that a family of four with two incomes needs to be earning a combined $400K to be able to reasonably afford the paid child care needed for both parents to be working.
        bryanlarsen 4mo ago
  - genxy 4mo ago
    The kinds of people that become billionaires are not those who are happy, the hole in their sole is why they are billionaires in the first place. Yes there are exceptions, just like with everything. You should probably have a billion dollars, you would do great things. But you probably shouldn't become a billionaire to get there. Being rich doesn't make one unhappy, but getting there does. That relentless grind changes a person, much like the ring. I echo the sentiment in this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48630565 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48630565
  - thomascountz 4mo ago
    Money can't buy happiness, but it can buy less unhappiness. There's diminishing returns, of course, but I'd hazard it looks a bit like ln(n), in that the returns are quite significant in the beginning.
    - tsunamifury 4mo ago
      And the remaining unhappinesses can end up in starker relief, as you continuously try to remove all unhappinesses from your life to nearly impossible and sometimes distorted degrees. The problem isn’t that money doesn’t buy happiness, it’s that it can remove your ability to endure the necessary amounts of unhappiness in life.
    - the_mitsuhiko 4mo ago
      Money can very much buy happiness. Most of the things that make you unhappy can be remedied with money. How much money you need to accomplish that depends though.
      - Mond_ 4mo ago
        > Money can't buy happiness, but it can buy less unhappiness > Money can very much buy happiness. Most of the things that make you unhappy can be remedied with money Was it too hard to read beyond the first comma?
      - cortesoft 4mo ago
        The person you are replying to agrees that money can get rid of things that cause unhappiness. The point is that removing unhappiness is only part of what creates happiness, and money can’t buy the other part.
      - sph 4mo ago
        > Most of the things that make you unhappy can be remedied with money Nonsense. Most of the things that can be remedied with money are not the truly painful things of life either. Will money save you from heartache? From the pain of losing a loved one? From being lonely? From having no respect from your peers? From losing your health to incurable cancer? At that point, all money can do for one is make them even more pathetic.
  - sph 4mo ago
    [dead]
  - jmull 4mo ago
    Being rich doesn’t make you unhappy. But spending your life pursuing an unsatisfiable goal (because the goal is “more”) probably isn’t good for your happiness. Not to mention, there are very satisfying ways to contribute to things you think are important that don’t necessarily involve a lot of money.
  - microtonal 4mo ago
    Damn if I had all the money I have so many good-willed projects I want to throw money at! I think this is quite defeatist thinking. A thousand people who donate $400 is also $400k and is well within the realm of most people here. A lot of non-profits also want the thousand people that donate $400, because $400 yearly from thousand people is much more robust long-term funding. Recently a well-known Dutch journalist, who started an organization to critically follow big tag (and take them to court when necessary), raised 1.3 million Euro. Most of it is from people like you and me, who can chip in 10 Euro monthly. It's reliable, because most people just have a recurring donation set up. Not to detract from mitchellh's pledge, because ideally you get both types of donations.
    - civet_java 4mo ago
      I think the point that above commentor was making is that mitchellh is likely more than a 1000 times as rich as most commentors here and that being able to out-influence over a 1000 people can be quite personally satisfying.
    - trollbridge 4mo ago
      We're working on a subscription model (well, membership - it's nonprofit) that is in the $3 - $5 range per month per member (or annually for $30 - $50). The main reason for this is simply so members will feel buy-in and will be willing to participate more and sit on advisory committees and so forth, although the extra cash can be useful, but it's not the primary focus.
- sph 4mo ago
  You can 'throw' what you can afford and it will feel as satisfying. Just try it.
  - dwroberts 4mo ago
    Seems obvious the parent comment was making a point about how much money it is and not just whether it feels nice to donate money. 400k can go a long way
  - alchemist1e9 4mo ago
    EDIT: comment was under incorrect parent. my error. moved it to correct location. EDIT2: Actually it’s more interesting. The commenters seem have changed their wording away from what I was criticizing. Original observation: Try to purge envy from your heart. It’s a poison. There was originally a lot of dark envy in this thread but interestingly it’s been revised out to be more subtle.
    - sevenzero 4mo ago
      In a working society, nobody should be able to throw away life changing money. Being rich is poisonous to society. Most of us suffer due to people hoarding money and humanity needs to overcome the concept of money generally.
      - nkrisc 4mo ago
        Wicked people will be wicked with or without money.
        gr8painz 4mo ago
        [dead]
      - jazzyjackson 4mo ago
        Hoarding money is not economically prudent in a system designed with mild inflation. Money loses value sitting still, to grow wealth there has to be some action with a positive return. The trouble will billionaires is the oligopolizing of power and influence, not that they're sitting on gold that could otherwise be yours... I've spent a lot of time in communities trying to grow past 'money' and decided that the usual replacement is allegiance to some other ideology that aligns everyone's incentives to a common cause or cult. I'd rather have diverse incentives with a common language of cash.
- b-kf 4mo ago
  Not sure about the motivation behind the comment, but small donations help too and provide you with a good feeling. Almost anyone here can probably part with the equivalent sum of money of a mobile phone plan in their country and split it across their most valued open source projects. I've honestly come to the conclusion that if you rely on open source software you simply should. Many of us have probably been poor at some point (e.g. as a student, young adult), but most of us spend a significant amount of time in their life having means to contribute, even if only small.
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
- alchemist1e9 4mo ago
  what was your original comment? I’m pretty sure it was a lot more critical sounding.
- paufernandez 4mo ago
  The most beautiful form of power.
allknowingfrog 4mo ago
I really appreciate the "it's okay to be weird" sentiment. It has never been easier to try out a crazy idea. We may as well embrace it and try to learn something.
swordlucky666 4mo ago
[flagged]
throwaw12 4mo ago
I read it as a pledge to continue doing non-AI-LLM-slop work. End result could be interesting for everyone, on one side project with no-LLM policy and on the other side projects which heavily rely on LLMs. In the short term we might not see the benefits, this pledge reads like: "Please keep doing what you are doing now, I am interested in how far it goes" (not in any negative sense)
hylaride 4mo ago
If I ever get "fuck you" money like Mitchell did, I plan to use his post-money life as an inspiration to "retire".
osigurdson 4mo ago
Zig is really nice. I enjoy using it a lot. Glad to hear that it is getting a little more funding.
hresvelgr 4mo ago
Another language that is in a similar space to Zig that I think deserves more attention, particularly for funding is Odin. While I think Zig is a great language, there is a consistency of design and simplicity to Odin that makes low-level programming more ergonomic and enjoyable to me. While Zig boasts a lot of impressive projects, Odin was used to build the JangaFX suite[1]. [1] https://jangafx.com/ https://jangafx.com/
- b-kf 4mo ago
  Appreciate Odin, especially the batteries included approach (simple to use structure of arrays, matrices, array programming, the context system for custom allocators, ...). To be fair though: the heavy lifting in JangaFX is likely done by a ton of C++ code, it being high performance real time graphics programming. I assume C++ outweighs Odin in their code base by a significant margin (accounting for all dependencies).
  - dogwalker5000 4mo ago
    JangFX is the company I believe. They have many products. One of them, EmberGen (a fluid simulator), is fully written in Odin. No idea what the rest are written in.
- rootlocus 4mo ago
  Ginger Bill, the Odin language developer, is openly hostile against package managers (he wrote a post called "Package Managers Are Evil") so he maintains his own wrappers of popular C libraries in vendor folder next to the compiler. That doesn't sound like a healthy ecosystem to me. I think zig is also highly opinionated but it always seemed to me that Andrew started from solid pillars and made an excellent job of carefully considering each feature that was added to the language: - No hidden control flow. - No hidden memory allocations. - No preprocessor, no macros. Odin on the other hand is just some developer's personal taste marketed as "Programming Done Right". So, if you disagree with any choice Bill made, you're not doing programming right.
  - hiccuphippo 4mo ago
mi_lk 4mo ago
Nothing more beautiful when game recognizes game.
- Npovview 4mo ago
  I wish Rich people did this more often. Not just rich people but rich companies. Not just rich companies but rich governments. But we are a broken society. People should be paying more to OSS for building digital infrastructure.
colesantiago 4mo ago
Doesn't this prove that Mitchell Hashimoto is probably the only "good billionaire"? I thought all billionaires were bad?
- sigzero 4mo ago
  I am sure there are some bad billionaires. That moniker is used to demonize them for the most part.
- InsideOutSanta 4mo ago
  I guess it depends on exactly what you're talking about, but my impression is that the primary "billionaires are bad" argument is simply that a system that allows billionaires to exist is inherently broken. A system that rewards people based on their actual contributions would not allow billionaires to exist. The fact that some billionaires use their money to do good does not contradict that argument.
- hylaride 4mo ago
  It's because you only hear about the loud ones. There are lots doing good work. In particular Lauren Bezos and Laurene Powell Jobs. Warren Buffet is essentially bequeathed the majority of his wealth to good causes. A lot of the work of the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation is phenomenal (despite the recent and disturbing Epstein news). George Soros has funded a lot of good causes, depending on how far you want to believe the conspiracy theories. Harris Rosen funded free daycares and university tuition to benefit an impoverished Orlando community. Dolly Parton's philanthropy is legendary. A lot of the Robber barons (Andrew Carnegie, Rockefeller's) bequeathed to causes that Americans are still benefiting from today. Yvon Chouinard, Founder of Patagonia, pretty much gave the company away for environmental causes. Chuck Feeney pretty much gave away 99% of his wealth.
- qmmmur 4mo ago
  I’m not going to personally donate a little under 0.1% of my net worth, and I may seem a hypocrite, but at some point you have to acknowledge that it’s a maddening, life changing amount of money that in no way would have a noticeable effect on his life. On the other hand, it could hurt most people’s ability to pay rent to give away that money. Survival is mostly a fixed cost that is unmet by many people, while other people donate those who are less off’s life earnings to their fancies they vibe with. It’s gross. Unfortunately humans are not brave or imaginative enough to realise another system (99% tax on billionaires would be a start), but most people also hate the idea that someone in need would get something for free or at a low cost.
teekert 4mo ago
Adults responding in adult ways. Respect.
qudat 4mo ago
Major props to Mitchell (and his family) for these donations.
Imustaskforhelp 4mo ago
> I use AI heavily. I've written about my AI adoption journey and shipping real features with AI assistance. I'm also quite vocal about remaining rational about its capabilities and frustrated with its negative impacts on open source. > The point is that I have opinions. Those opinions don't fully align with ZSF's approach. And yet, I have nothing but respect for ZSF: the people, the policies, and the project. Part of what makes the internet and open source great is that projects can be weird and different. They can set unusual boundaries, build their own culture, and pursue quality in ways that won't make sense to everyone. Mitchell does feel like the adult in the room when other people are having chain-saws and acting irrationally for a lack of better term (for example jared/bun controversy which the post just somewhat touches on) (Mitchell's tweet about AI psychosis is genuinely influential and is now a pointer to what this phenomenon might be) I really think him and simon's opinions are somehow decently nuanced opinions on AI that the internet has to offer. Now glazing of mitchell aside, I am happy that zig foundation gets such amount of money and I am really excited that Zig an independent language is able to get the level of love that it does. There is a famous talk by the creator of Elm on the economics of independent programming languages and how its hard for them to get sponsored if they aren't already working at a company (Rust was created at Mozilla, Golang was created by Google) This is a real issue that is true for most of open-source and I am just happy that we are atleast moving slowly towards some good as well. Its an uphill battle with multiple lows but I am happy for the positive changes as it gets as open source does have a special place in my heart as it taught me about privacy and many of your hearts as well.
- Arrowmaster 4mo ago
  As things are right now, I see this as a respectable way of operating. Michael has made his views and usage of AI known. The Ghostty project has a detailed AI policy for users to see and the team is willing to devote resources to enforcing a middle ground policy. The Zig project has a detailed policy taking a strict stance and as a result I expect they do not have expend as much resources when a contribution is suspected of being AI assisted. A strict policy on either side is easier to enforce based on finite resources (mostly people). I'm sure many projects would like to have a middle ground policy but cannot currently devote the resources it would require long term. We might never see a shift in moderation abilities and this remains for the longer term, or there could be advanced in moderation that allows projects to adopt a more nuisanced policy that's right for them.
GodelNumbering 4mo ago
I have been experimenting with modifying Ghostty lately. It's a well attended codebase and a pleasure to work with, props to Mitchell. Since Ghostty is written in Zig, I ended up adding native Zig AST support in Dirac (https://github.com/dirac-run/dirac/blob/master/src/services/tree-sitter/queries/zig.ts https://github.com/dirac-run/dirac/blob/master/src/services/...) One thing the has been a little unintuitive is the pattern of all code and tests in single files, which makes the filesizes grow much larger. Also if you're coming from inheritance supported languages, Zig forces a different way of thinking
trizoza 4mo ago
What a word of wisdom right there, the bit about internet is beautiful because it's ok to be weird - this is often the opposite on twitter, fb, reddit and many discords where if you have a different opinion you get mobbed by angry comments making one feel worse about their own weirdness.
- galleywest200 4mo ago
  Different opinion != being weird.
  - gr8painz 4mo ago
    [flagged]
  - sinpif 4mo ago
    Yeah, well, that's just, like...
- paufernandez 4mo ago
  It is increasingly important to be able to see that many things are true. There is no single "truth". Many things are true at the same time, and in all aspects of life. Each brain is like a band pass filter, and the effort we should make is to try to imagine the points of view of others, which are just different slices of the same world. Then embrace the slices we like, and just ignore the ones we don't, but don't argue or fight for our slice as it if was the only one.
  - jasonjayr 4mo ago
    The problem arises when there are contradictory truths, and defenders of one or both sides refuse to dig deeper to both self-reflect on what they believe to be true, and perhaps come to a deeper more correct understanding.
  - hallole 4mo ago
    There is only a single source of truth and that is objective reality. Maybe you agree with that, but your wording is messy. It's true that different perspectives can yield their own particular bits of truth, if that's what you're saying.
walthamstow 4mo ago
I'm not in the OSS world much so hopefully someone can help me understand: what does 700k buy you in OSS language development?
- randusername 4mo ago
  https://ziglang.org/news/2025-financials https://ziglang.org/news/2025-financials
- hiccuphippo 4mo ago
  In the case of Zig, You can see their financial reports here: https://ziglang.org/news/2025-financials/ https://ziglang.org/news/2025-financials/ Most of it goes to contributors.
  - alper 4mo ago
    Who are paid at a steady and relatively decent rate. That's cool.
    - trollbridge 4mo ago
      $60 an hour is an absolute bargain for a developer who can operate at this level, particularly considering they aren't using AI tools.
Lerc 4mo ago
It's great to be in a position to do this, however I'm beginning to think that their greater contribution is ghostty I don't really know how to value things any more when I see someone develop a tool that is kind-of useful that then gets acquired for half a billion dollars. As someone with a decent number of decades of terminal hopping, the improvement that ghostty has brought a breath of fresh air. To me it has represented more utility that a few of those acquisitions.
- wickrom 4mo ago
  I'd love to hear what made you settle on ghostty. There is not dearth of terminal emulators out there, each claiming performance or batteries included.
  - dust-jacket 4mo ago
    I'm not the commenter, but for me ghostty was good for being a Very Good terminal experience with almost no config required. Just checked and the config file for my daily use terminal setup is 3 lines long. 3! That means I know I can chuck it on any system, any clean re-install, and it'll be Fine. That counts for a lot when you've grown tired of endless config tweaking.
    - zemnl 4mo ago
      Same for me. My config is a couple lines longer, but other than font-family, font-size, color theme and a couple of other settings I didn't need to change anything else. I definitely spent way less time configuring it to suit my needs that I did with any other terminal I used before.
    - ngrilly 4mo ago
      Same. Almost everything works out of the box, with great defaults.
  - noisy_boy 4mo ago
    Seconded. I keep hearing about ghostty but I have yet to see a strong enough justification about how it is _that_ better. I use konsole and has significantly more user friendly screen to manage settings. I heard about ghostty's performance so I did some timing tests and ghostty was faster than konsole but not that much - not in any perceptibly significant measurable sense.
cute_boi 4mo ago
I have been using zig and it is so much better. I am thankful they are avoiding vibe slop in compilers.
tadasv 4mo ago
This is great IMO. I like zig as a language and the idea behind it. But boy, it has a syntax issue. I with they figure out better syntax before 1.0, developer ergonomics I think are as important.
- n42 4mo ago
  https://matklad.github.io/2025/08/09/zigs-lovely-syntax.html https://matklad.github.io/2025/08/09/zigs-lovely-syntax.html
- lukaslalinsky 4mo ago
  Zig has multiple issues, but syntax is definitely not it. It might take a little bit of time getting used to, if you are coming from another language, but it's one of the most readable languages I've ever worked with.
  - benatkin 4mo ago
    That is an opinion framed as a fact. There's plenty to rub a coder the wrong way, such as the sigil in builtin functions like @import, the dot syntax in structures (.{}, Timestamp{ .seconds = 0, .nanos = 0, };), triple slash comments (///), and multiline strings (beginning each with \\ - good luck grepping for escaped backslashes). However, that is just like any programming language - none is immune to this criticism.
    - peesem 4mo ago
      the triple slash is only for doc comments, not normal code comments - those are still double slashes. also, why would you want to grep for escaped backslashes?
  - seanclayton 4mo ago
    Lisps have multiple issues, but syntax is definitely not it. It might take a little bit of time getting used to, if you are coming from another language, but LISPs are some of the most readable languages I've ever worked with.
- 4mo ago
mawadev 4mo ago
I love this guy
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
jdw64 4mo ago
[dead]
jaypatelani 4mo ago
[flagged]
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
- loeg 4mo ago
  Then do?
  - jaypatelani 4mo ago
    I did but don't have 400k laying around lol
  - civet_java 4mo ago
    I'm curious - what's the point of this comment? Did you think the commentor was unaware of their own capacity for philanthropy?
yuvrajsa 4mo ago
[flagged]
acedTrex 4mo ago
I started using zig more heavily for some edge device ML inference projects lately after watching Andrews jetbrains interview and it really really resonating with me on a personal level. Am also really overall enjoying the language, it def has some rough spots regarding documentation and the stdlib but overall has been very nice to work with in neovim. I can't throw 400k but I'll go ahead and pledge some dollars towards it as well.
randypewick 4mo ago
Yay a big win for open source! Now I wonder what other donations were deemed as much as - or more - useful.
Surac 4mo ago
do good and talk about post
reinitctxoffset 4mo ago
Low value comment but obligatory to a superfan: mitchellh is based AF and it just keeps giving back. I switched to `ghostel` in emacs this weekend and it's give or take life changing. Keep being the fuckin man.
dieseleration 4mo ago
I think it makes perfect sense for Zig to have their stand against LLM contributions while consumers of the compiler/Zig project overall use whatever code aids they like. Building a language is not a matter of churning out as much greenfield code as possible, but in careful consideration of whether or not some feature and its implementation fits coherently into the entire overall language. It's upstream of so much, and we now have decades and decades of examples where just letting rip with new additions renders a language schizoid and unergonomic. An LLM's tendency to "yes, of course, and," to any suggestion is not what a healthy language project needs, but it can be tremendously useful for someone employing a balanced and ergonomic language to generate products. I'm glad to see Mitchell keeping a cool head as the unfortunate tendency in so many devs to take sides and get dogmatic plays out yet again.
- joaohaas 4mo ago
  This is not the main reason for the ban. You can read the linked post in the article that explains the AI ban thing in more depth.
waffletower 4mo ago
I applaud this, particularly as I view Zig as a viable alternative to rust for many applications. Do I think rust is a positive addition to the Linux kernel. Absolutely. Would I reach for rust or Zig first when I was implementing a real-time audio synthesizer if I had to choose between the two? Unless Rusteze, a Clojure dialect hosted on rust existed, I would choose Zig. I sense a hegemonic power growing behind rust, and I think we need to support a breadth of alternatives in how we invoke computation.
- sufficientsoup 4mo ago
  > I sense a hegemonic power growing behind rust Can you elaborate on this?
- rnio 4mo ago
  [flagged]
Hasz 4mo ago
Mitchell Hashimoto, talk about putting your money where your mouth is. What a cool dude. Much respect!
nilsherzig 4mo ago
If you're unsure about spending the time to learn Zig, I really recommend watching the following interview with the creator of Zig https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqddnwKF8HQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqddnwKF8HQ convinced me more than any design doc or blogpost could
- zazuke 4mo ago
  It's soo good, just watched it before.
- Jonovono 4mo ago
  Very interesting, but wild to me how much this guy resembles Elon (in not only appearance but also mannerisms and way he speaks)
  - punkbit 4mo ago
    Finally someone else notices it!
  - keepupnow 4mo ago
    Absolutely
  - bayarearefugee 4mo ago
    > this guy resembles Elon What an awful thing to say about a person.
  - strix_varius 4mo ago
    Yeah he's like the light side Elon. Happy with his life, his family, his choices. Content. Zen.
hacker_88 4mo ago
Is Bun's Zig fork called Bunzig ?
- radhitya 4mo ago
  Huh, is there?
aapoalas 4mo ago
Really cool to see Zig have strong support and a stable financial status <3
neverrroot 4mo ago
[flagged]
- AndyKelley 4mo ago
  happy pride month
skhameneh 4mo ago
Has the Zig team/community warmed up towards other systems-ish languages? This is speaking from recollection engaging with programming communities years back - I found the Rust community to be interested and respectful of Zig but it didn’t seem to be well reciprocated, if anything much the opposite.
wiseowise 4mo ago
I thought the correct way was to build everything on Zig, get butthurt when they don’t merge your slop, and then rewrite it in rust?
RustSupremacist 4mo ago
Donations to the Zig Software Foundation largely go to contributors to the language. Meanwhile, donations to the Rust Foundation largely go into pockets unknown. The key difference is that the Rust Foundation is a 501(c)(6) and not a 501(c)(3). The Rust Foundation would do better for the community if they were a 501(c)(3) and more transparent about finances. Follow this example for the greater good.
lerno 4mo ago
$400k is serious money and will certainly help keeping the Zig team funded. I must gratulate Andrew and the team on their ability to create a product that is creating this kind of enthusiasm from its users. One thing that’s sometimes overlooked though is that all donations are something that we’re grateful for, regardless of amount. If you have little to spend then even $1 a month is an investment that rivals $10000 by someone rich. Also worth remembering is that the vast majority of language projects aren’t operating at Zig’s scale. For smaller projects such as C3, even modest recurring support can have a meaningful impact on long-term sustainability. It doesn’t need to be $100000s a month to make a huge difference.

810 points by tosh 4mo ago

ksdme9 4mo ago

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

cyber_kinetist 4mo ago
I really do not understand how people talk about "Being rich / being a billionaire will make you fundamentally unhappy". Damn if I had all the money I have so many good-willed projects I want to throw money at!
- epolanski 4mo ago
  Yet most wealthy people don't act like that. The wealthiest man on the planet looks to be quite miserable, insecure and bitter most of the time.
- Daishiman 4mo ago
  Because the most vocal rich people in this age seem to have an unusual lack of empathy and just being able to enjoy themselves.
  - InsideOutSanta 4mo ago
    Yeah, I think people have the correlation backward. I suspect that driven people are more likely to get rich and less likely to be happy, so there seem to be a lot of angry rich dudes. Meanwhile, people who get rich by accident often seem able to improve their own lives and those of others with their money. The recent article about the founder of Craigslist comes to mind.
    - toomuchtodo 4mo ago
      Nailed it.
    - yard2010 4mo ago
      I wonder what is better, for people, for society, having many rich angry people or having many poor angry people?
      - InsideOutSanta 4mo ago
        How about let's aim for neither ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
    - SoftTalker 4mo ago
      People who get rich by accident (e.g. lottery winners) typically spend it all and end up back where they started. Money is hard to hold on to for people who are unsophisticated about money. Predators and grifters come out of the woodwork to take a lot of it, and the rest gets frittered away on trinkets.
      - InsideOutSanta 4mo ago
        So they did improve the lives of the people around them.
- IshKebab 4mo ago
  Yeah I feel the same about people who say they wouldn't know what to do when they retire. I have so many projects! I guess we are just different...
- darren0 4mo ago
  It will not make you unhappy. It will just not make you happy. Big difference. The saying "money can't buy happiness" is in fact true no matter how much people want to rationalize the opposite.
  - Herbstluft 4mo ago
    What that always leaves out, however, is that no/little money can very much cause a lot of unhappiness.
    - bluGill 4mo ago
      The amount of money to get over that hump is small. Many people in poverty are happy. If you are at the very bottom with not enough to eat and such money can buy happiness, but you can be below the poverty line and still be about as happy as everyone.
      - SoftTalker 4mo ago
        This is a lie that people with money tell themselves to make themselves feel better about not giving away more of their money (ironically, proving themselves correct). There's certainly a point of diminishing returns, and I'd even agree that it is a cliff. Once you have a decent place to live, and your day-to-day worries about paying the bills are covered, and unexpected emergencies do not threaten your ability to get to work, keep your job, and pay your rent, then for most people more money has a diminishing impact on happiness. But that amount of money is quite a bit more than the poverty line.
        ff317 4mo ago
        Quite a bit indeed. Forbes ran an article a few months ago claiming that a family of four with two incomes needs to be earning a combined $400K to be able to reasonably afford the paid child care needed for both parents to be working.
      - bryanlarsen 4mo ago
- genxy 4mo ago
  The kinds of people that become billionaires are not those who are happy, the hole in their sole is why they are billionaires in the first place. Yes there are exceptions, just like with everything. You should probably have a billion dollars, you would do great things. But you probably shouldn't become a billionaire to get there. Being rich doesn't make one unhappy, but getting there does. That relentless grind changes a person, much like the ring. I echo the sentiment in this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48630565 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48630565
- thomascountz 4mo ago
  Money can't buy happiness, but it can buy less unhappiness. There's diminishing returns, of course, but I'd hazard it looks a bit like ln(n), in that the returns are quite significant in the beginning.
  - tsunamifury 4mo ago
    And the remaining unhappinesses can end up in starker relief, as you continuously try to remove all unhappinesses from your life to nearly impossible and sometimes distorted degrees. The problem isn’t that money doesn’t buy happiness, it’s that it can remove your ability to endure the necessary amounts of unhappiness in life.
  - the_mitsuhiko 4mo ago
    Money can very much buy happiness. Most of the things that make you unhappy can be remedied with money. How much money you need to accomplish that depends though.
    - Mond_ 4mo ago
      > Money can't buy happiness, but it can buy less unhappiness > Money can very much buy happiness. Most of the things that make you unhappy can be remedied with money Was it too hard to read beyond the first comma?
    - cortesoft 4mo ago
      The person you are replying to agrees that money can get rid of things that cause unhappiness. The point is that removing unhappiness is only part of what creates happiness, and money can’t buy the other part.
    - sph 4mo ago
      > Most of the things that make you unhappy can be remedied with money Nonsense. Most of the things that can be remedied with money are not the truly painful things of life either. Will money save you from heartache? From the pain of losing a loved one? From being lonely? From having no respect from your peers? From losing your health to incurable cancer? At that point, all money can do for one is make them even more pathetic.
- sph 4mo ago
  [dead]
- jmull 4mo ago
  Being rich doesn’t make you unhappy. But spending your life pursuing an unsatisfiable goal (because the goal is “more”) probably isn’t good for your happiness. Not to mention, there are very satisfying ways to contribute to things you think are important that don’t necessarily involve a lot of money.
- microtonal 4mo ago
  Damn if I had all the money I have so many good-willed projects I want to throw money at! I think this is quite defeatist thinking. A thousand people who donate $400 is also $400k and is well within the realm of most people here. A lot of non-profits also want the thousand people that donate $400, because $400 yearly from thousand people is much more robust long-term funding. Recently a well-known Dutch journalist, who started an organization to critically follow big tag (and take them to court when necessary), raised 1.3 million Euro. Most of it is from people like you and me, who can chip in 10 Euro monthly. It's reliable, because most people just have a recurring donation set up. Not to detract from mitchellh's pledge, because ideally you get both types of donations.
  - civet_java 4mo ago
    I think the point that above commentor was making is that mitchellh is likely more than a 1000 times as rich as most commentors here and that being able to out-influence over a 1000 people can be quite personally satisfying.
  - trollbridge 4mo ago
    We're working on a subscription model (well, membership - it's nonprofit) that is in the $3 - $5 range per month per member (or annually for $30 - $50). The main reason for this is simply so members will feel buy-in and will be willing to participate more and sit on advisory committees and so forth, although the extra cash can be useful, but it's not the primary focus.
sph 4mo ago
You can 'throw' what you can afford and it will feel as satisfying. Just try it.
- dwroberts 4mo ago
  Seems obvious the parent comment was making a point about how much money it is and not just whether it feels nice to donate money. 400k can go a long way
- alchemist1e9 4mo ago
  EDIT: comment was under incorrect parent. my error. moved it to correct location. EDIT2: Actually it’s more interesting. The commenters seem have changed their wording away from what I was criticizing. Original observation: Try to purge envy from your heart. It’s a poison. There was originally a lot of dark envy in this thread but interestingly it’s been revised out to be more subtle.
  - sevenzero 4mo ago
    In a working society, nobody should be able to throw away life changing money. Being rich is poisonous to society. Most of us suffer due to people hoarding money and humanity needs to overcome the concept of money generally.
    - nkrisc 4mo ago
      Wicked people will be wicked with or without money.
      - gr8painz 4mo ago
        [dead]
    - jazzyjackson 4mo ago
      Hoarding money is not economically prudent in a system designed with mild inflation. Money loses value sitting still, to grow wealth there has to be some action with a positive return. The trouble will billionaires is the oligopolizing of power and influence, not that they're sitting on gold that could otherwise be yours... I've spent a lot of time in communities trying to grow past 'money' and decided that the usual replacement is allegiance to some other ideology that aligns everyone's incentives to a common cause or cult. I'd rather have diverse incentives with a common language of cash.
b-kf 4mo ago
Not sure about the motivation behind the comment, but small donations help too and provide you with a good feeling. Almost anyone here can probably part with the equivalent sum of money of a mobile phone plan in their country and split it across their most valued open source projects. I've honestly come to the conclusion that if you rely on open source software you simply should. Many of us have probably been poor at some point (e.g. as a student, young adult), but most of us spend a significant amount of time in their life having means to contribute, even if only small.
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
alchemist1e9 4mo ago
what was your original comment? I’m pretty sure it was a lot more critical sounding.
paufernandez 4mo ago
The most beautiful form of power.

allknowingfrog 4mo ago

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

swordlucky666 4mo ago

[flagged]

throwaw12 4mo ago

I read it as a pledge to continue doing non-AI-LLM-slop work. End result could be interesting for everyone, on one side project with no-LLM policy and on the other side projects which heavily rely on LLMs. In the short term we might not see the benefits, this pledge reads like: "Please keep doing what you are doing now, I am interested in how far it goes" (not in any negative sense)

hylaride 4mo ago

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

osigurdson 4mo ago

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

hresvelgr 4mo ago

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

b-kf 4mo ago
Appreciate Odin, especially the batteries included approach (simple to use structure of arrays, matrices, array programming, the context system for custom allocators, ...). To be fair though: the heavy lifting in JangaFX is likely done by a ton of C++ code, it being high performance real time graphics programming. I assume C++ outweighs Odin in their code base by a significant margin (accounting for all dependencies).
- dogwalker5000 4mo ago
  JangFX is the company I believe. They have many products. One of them, EmberGen (a fluid simulator), is fully written in Odin. No idea what the rest are written in.
rootlocus 4mo ago
Ginger Bill, the Odin language developer, is openly hostile against package managers (he wrote a post called "Package Managers Are Evil") so he maintains his own wrappers of popular C libraries in vendor folder next to the compiler. That doesn't sound like a healthy ecosystem to me. I think zig is also highly opinionated but it always seemed to me that Andrew started from solid pillars and made an excellent job of carefully considering each feature that was added to the language: - No hidden control flow. - No hidden memory allocations. - No preprocessor, no macros. Odin on the other hand is just some developer's personal taste marketed as "Programming Done Right". So, if you disagree with any choice Bill made, you're not doing programming right.
- hiccuphippo 4mo ago

mi_lk 4mo ago

Nothing more beautiful when game recognizes game.

Npovview 4mo ago
I wish Rich people did this more often. Not just rich people but rich companies. Not just rich companies but rich governments. But we are a broken society. People should be paying more to OSS for building digital infrastructure.

colesantiago 4mo ago

Doesn't this prove that Mitchell Hashimoto is probably the only "good billionaire"? I thought all billionaires were bad?

sigzero 4mo ago
I am sure there are some bad billionaires. That moniker is used to demonize them for the most part.
InsideOutSanta 4mo ago
I guess it depends on exactly what you're talking about, but my impression is that the primary "billionaires are bad" argument is simply that a system that allows billionaires to exist is inherently broken. A system that rewards people based on their actual contributions would not allow billionaires to exist. The fact that some billionaires use their money to do good does not contradict that argument.
hylaride 4mo ago
It's because you only hear about the loud ones. There are lots doing good work. In particular Lauren Bezos and Laurene Powell Jobs. Warren Buffet is essentially bequeathed the majority of his wealth to good causes. A lot of the work of the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation is phenomenal (despite the recent and disturbing Epstein news). George Soros has funded a lot of good causes, depending on how far you want to believe the conspiracy theories. Harris Rosen funded free daycares and university tuition to benefit an impoverished Orlando community. Dolly Parton's philanthropy is legendary. A lot of the Robber barons (Andrew Carnegie, Rockefeller's) bequeathed to causes that Americans are still benefiting from today. Yvon Chouinard, Founder of Patagonia, pretty much gave the company away for environmental causes. Chuck Feeney pretty much gave away 99% of his wealth.
qmmmur 4mo ago
I’m not going to personally donate a little under 0.1% of my net worth, and I may seem a hypocrite, but at some point you have to acknowledge that it’s a maddening, life changing amount of money that in no way would have a noticeable effect on his life. On the other hand, it could hurt most people’s ability to pay rent to give away that money. Survival is mostly a fixed cost that is unmet by many people, while other people donate those who are less off’s life earnings to their fancies they vibe with. It’s gross. Unfortunately humans are not brave or imaginative enough to realise another system (99% tax on billionaires would be a start), but most people also hate the idea that someone in need would get something for free or at a low cost.

teekert 4mo ago

Adults responding in adult ways. Respect.

qudat 4mo ago

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

Imustaskforhelp 4mo ago

> I use AI heavily. I've written about my AI adoption journey and shipping real features with AI assistance. I'm also quite vocal about remaining rational about its capabilities and frustrated with its negative impacts on open source. > The point is that I have opinions. Those opinions don't fully align with ZSF's approach. And yet, I have nothing but respect for ZSF: the people, the policies, and the project. Part of what makes the internet and open source great is that projects can be weird and different. They can set unusual boundaries, build their own culture, and pursue quality in ways that won't make sense to everyone. Mitchell does feel like the adult in the room when other people are having chain-saws and acting irrationally for a lack of better term (for example jared/bun controversy which the post just somewhat touches on) (Mitchell's tweet about AI psychosis is genuinely influential and is now a pointer to what this phenomenon might be) I really think him and simon's opinions are somehow decently nuanced opinions on AI that the internet has to offer. Now glazing of mitchell aside, I am happy that zig foundation gets such amount of money and I am really excited that Zig an independent language is able to get the level of love that it does. There is a famous talk by the creator of Elm on the economics of independent programming languages and how its hard for them to get sponsored if they aren't already working at a company (Rust was created at Mozilla, Golang was created by Google) This is a real issue that is true for most of open-source and I am just happy that we are atleast moving slowly towards some good as well. Its an uphill battle with multiple lows but I am happy for the positive changes as it gets as open source does have a special place in my heart as it taught me about privacy and many of your hearts as well.

Arrowmaster 4mo ago
As things are right now, I see this as a respectable way of operating. Michael has made his views and usage of AI known. The Ghostty project has a detailed AI policy for users to see and the team is willing to devote resources to enforcing a middle ground policy. The Zig project has a detailed policy taking a strict stance and as a result I expect they do not have expend as much resources when a contribution is suspected of being AI assisted. A strict policy on either side is easier to enforce based on finite resources (mostly people). I'm sure many projects would like to have a middle ground policy but cannot currently devote the resources it would require long term. We might never see a shift in moderation abilities and this remains for the longer term, or there could be advanced in moderation that allows projects to adopt a more nuisanced policy that's right for them.

GodelNumbering 4mo ago

I have been experimenting with modifying Ghostty lately. It's a well attended codebase and a pleasure to work with, props to Mitchell. Since Ghostty is written in Zig, I ended up adding native Zig AST support in Dirac (https://github.com/dirac-run/dirac/blob/master/src/services/tree-sitter/queries/zig.ts https://github.com/dirac-run/dirac/blob/master/src/services/...) One thing the has been a little unintuitive is the pattern of all code and tests in single files, which makes the filesizes grow much larger. Also if you're coming from inheritance supported languages, Zig forces a different way of thinking

trizoza 4mo ago

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

galleywest200 4mo ago
Different opinion != being weird.
- gr8painz 4mo ago
  [flagged]
- sinpif 4mo ago
  Yeah, well, that's just, like...
paufernandez 4mo ago
It is increasingly important to be able to see that many things are true. There is no single "truth". Many things are true at the same time, and in all aspects of life. Each brain is like a band pass filter, and the effort we should make is to try to imagine the points of view of others, which are just different slices of the same world. Then embrace the slices we like, and just ignore the ones we don't, but don't argue or fight for our slice as it if was the only one.
- jasonjayr 4mo ago
  The problem arises when there are contradictory truths, and defenders of one or both sides refuse to dig deeper to both self-reflect on what they believe to be true, and perhaps come to a deeper more correct understanding.
- hallole 4mo ago
  There is only a single source of truth and that is objective reality. Maybe you agree with that, but your wording is messy. It's true that different perspectives can yield their own particular bits of truth, if that's what you're saying.

walthamstow 4mo ago

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

randusername 4mo ago
https://ziglang.org/news/2025-financials https://ziglang.org/news/2025-financials
hiccuphippo 4mo ago
In the case of Zig, You can see their financial reports here: https://ziglang.org/news/2025-financials/ https://ziglang.org/news/2025-financials/ Most of it goes to contributors.
- alper 4mo ago
  Who are paid at a steady and relatively decent rate. That's cool.
  - trollbridge 4mo ago
    $60 an hour is an absolute bargain for a developer who can operate at this level, particularly considering they aren't using AI tools.

Lerc 4mo ago

It's great to be in a position to do this, however I'm beginning to think that their greater contribution is ghostty I don't really know how to value things any more when I see someone develop a tool that is kind-of useful that then gets acquired for half a billion dollars. As someone with a decent number of decades of terminal hopping, the improvement that ghostty has brought a breath of fresh air. To me it has represented more utility that a few of those acquisitions.

wickrom 4mo ago
I'd love to hear what made you settle on ghostty. There is not dearth of terminal emulators out there, each claiming performance or batteries included.
- dust-jacket 4mo ago
  I'm not the commenter, but for me ghostty was good for being a Very Good terminal experience with almost no config required. Just checked and the config file for my daily use terminal setup is 3 lines long. 3! That means I know I can chuck it on any system, any clean re-install, and it'll be Fine. That counts for a lot when you've grown tired of endless config tweaking.
  - zemnl 4mo ago
    Same for me. My config is a couple lines longer, but other than font-family, font-size, color theme and a couple of other settings I didn't need to change anything else. I definitely spent way less time configuring it to suit my needs that I did with any other terminal I used before.
  - ngrilly 4mo ago
    Same. Almost everything works out of the box, with great defaults.
- noisy_boy 4mo ago
  Seconded. I keep hearing about ghostty but I have yet to see a strong enough justification about how it is _that_ better. I use konsole and has significantly more user friendly screen to manage settings. I heard about ghostty's performance so I did some timing tests and ghostty was faster than konsole but not that much - not in any perceptibly significant measurable sense.

cute_boi 4mo ago

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

tadasv 4mo ago

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

n42 4mo ago
https://matklad.github.io/2025/08/09/zigs-lovely-syntax.html https://matklad.github.io/2025/08/09/zigs-lovely-syntax.html
lukaslalinsky 4mo ago
Zig has multiple issues, but syntax is definitely not it. It might take a little bit of time getting used to, if you are coming from another language, but it's one of the most readable languages I've ever worked with.
- benatkin 4mo ago
  That is an opinion framed as a fact. There's plenty to rub a coder the wrong way, such as the sigil in builtin functions like @import, the dot syntax in structures (.{}, Timestamp{ .seconds = 0, .nanos = 0, };), triple slash comments (///), and multiline strings (beginning each with \\ - good luck grepping for escaped backslashes). However, that is just like any programming language - none is immune to this criticism.
  - peesem 4mo ago
    the triple slash is only for doc comments, not normal code comments - those are still double slashes. also, why would you want to grep for escaped backslashes?
- seanclayton 4mo ago
  Lisps have multiple issues, but syntax is definitely not it. It might take a little bit of time getting used to, if you are coming from another language, but LISPs are some of the most readable languages I've ever worked with.
4mo ago

mawadev 4mo ago

I love this guy

deleted 4mo ago

[deleted]

jdw64 4mo ago

[dead]

jaypatelani 4mo ago

[flagged]

deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
loeg 4mo ago
Then do?
- jaypatelani 4mo ago
  I did but don't have 400k laying around lol
- civet_java 4mo ago
  I'm curious - what's the point of this comment? Did you think the commentor was unaware of their own capacity for philanthropy?

yuvrajsa 4mo ago

[flagged]

acedTrex 4mo ago

I started using zig more heavily for some edge device ML inference projects lately after watching Andrews jetbrains interview and it really really resonating with me on a personal level. Am also really overall enjoying the language, it def has some rough spots regarding documentation and the stdlib but overall has been very nice to work with in neovim. I can't throw 400k but I'll go ahead and pledge some dollars towards it as well.

randypewick 4mo ago

Yay a big win for open source! Now I wonder what other donations were deemed as much as - or more - useful.

Surac 4mo ago

do good and talk about post

reinitctxoffset 4mo ago

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

dieseleration 4mo ago

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

joaohaas 4mo ago
This is not the main reason for the ban. You can read the linked post in the article that explains the AI ban thing in more depth.

waffletower 4mo ago

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

sufficientsoup 4mo ago
> I sense a hegemonic power growing behind rust Can you elaborate on this?
rnio 4mo ago
[flagged]

Hasz 4mo ago

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

nilsherzig 4mo ago

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

zazuke 4mo ago
It's soo good, just watched it before.
Jonovono 4mo ago
Very interesting, but wild to me how much this guy resembles Elon (in not only appearance but also mannerisms and way he speaks)
- punkbit 4mo ago
  Finally someone else notices it!
- keepupnow 4mo ago
  Absolutely
- bayarearefugee 4mo ago
  > this guy resembles Elon What an awful thing to say about a person.
- strix_varius 4mo ago
  Yeah he's like the light side Elon. Happy with his life, his family, his choices. Content. Zen.

hacker_88 4mo ago

Is Bun's Zig fork called Bunzig ?

radhitya 4mo ago
Huh, is there?

aapoalas 4mo ago

Really cool to see Zig have strong support and a stable financial status <3

neverrroot 4mo ago

[flagged]

AndyKelley 4mo ago
happy pride month

skhameneh 4mo ago

Has the Zig team/community warmed up towards other systems-ish languages? This is speaking from recollection engaging with programming communities years back - I found the Rust community to be interested and respectful of Zig but it didn’t seem to be well reciprocated, if anything much the opposite.

wiseowise 4mo ago

I thought the correct way was to build everything on Zig, get butthurt when they don’t merge your slop, and then rewrite it in rust?

RustSupremacist 4mo ago

Donations to the Zig Software Foundation largely go to contributors to the language. Meanwhile, donations to the Rust Foundation largely go into pockets unknown. The key difference is that the Rust Foundation is a 501(c)(6) and not a 501(c)(3). The Rust Foundation would do better for the community if they were a 501(c)(3) and more transparent about finances. Follow this example for the greater good.

lerno 4mo ago

$400k is serious money and will certainly help keeping the Zig team funded. I must gratulate Andrew and the team on their ability to create a product that is creating this kind of enthusiasm from its users. One thing that’s sometimes overlooked though is that all donations are something that we’re grateful for, regardless of amount. If you have little to spend then even $1 a month is an investment that rivals $10000 by someone rich. Also worth remembering is that the vast majority of language projects aren’t operating at Zig’s scale. For smaller projects such as C3, even modest recurring support can have a meaningful impact on long-term sustainability. It doesn’t need to be $100000s a month to make a huge difference.