Thank you, Mitchell Hashimoto. I have always wondered why folks who made their fortunes of technology do not give back consistently. You are part of the few folks such as Jan Koum, Gabriel Weinberg and I'm sure there others who I have failed to mentioned. Thank you.
Yeah agreed. You basically see small time donations, or boomers once they have their $50B+ pile of money pledging to give it away at death. Not a lot of big incremental giving in between by $100M-$1B class.
I mean Gates is doing good work on poverty & global health for sure, but hes quite the exception.
You don't see the durable institutions like new universities being setup like after the gilded age. Not sure if its a tax code thing or what.
One thought I've had, living in NYC, is that there are just businesses structured to take every incremental dollar out of you whether you are worth $0/$100K/$100M/$100B now. $100M condos in 5 different cities, $1M supercars, private jets, blade chopper from Manhattan to the jet, just so many ways to part fools from their cash.
For context, David Rockefeller's old NYC townhouse, which he lived in for 70 years, was for sale, post-renovation, for $50M or so. Rockefeller name synonymous with old money wealth.
These days though, a $50M apartment might not even crack the top 10 sales annually in 2020s NYC. New money is also hot money by comparison.. I really do think our vintage of wealthy are that much more rapacious.
In absolute value this is a fantastic contribution to support a very valuable project, and anybody who donates to Zig should be commended. It's one of a handful of projects that has a real chance of meaningfully pushing back against software bloat.
I do find it sobering to look at relative contribution, if for no other reason than to remind myself of the scales of money some are working with, and the out sized impact of having wealth. A $300k donation from a billionaire is loosely equivalent to somebody with $100k donating $30 (and likely has even less impact on quality of life!). We wouldn't have a hacker news article about such an event.
I should probably just shut up and go donate to Zig.
300k is 300k and the people receiving it won’t care if that’s chump change to the donor. Probably one of or the biggest donations the zigs foundation ever got. I don’t think it’s worth it making equivalences, I just commend it.
Of course, and I think it's fabulous. It's really just me being morose about how billionaires can throw this kind of money around in the same way a regular person might order a couple of pizzas.
There comes a certain point at which more money doesn't (short term) benefit the project much, and this says nothing about the (arguably) more worthy causes Hashimoto may have donated to.
> You don't see the durable institutions like new universities being setup like after the gilded age. Not sure if it’s a tax code thing or what.
For a while, America was much more aware that you could just kill the rich like you killed kings. The rich gave away more and did more for society as a way of washing their reputation and proving they shouldn’t be killed in an uprising. Today, global society has become much more legally certain around perceptions of property rights and entitlement of the rich to their wealth.
If we saw genuine movements in America to (for example) tax wealth above 1B at like a 99% tax rate, I bet you’d suddenly see a few new well endowed universities and concert halls and similar.
Instead today, the wealthy are much more interested in showing off their reputation by buying media companies (WashPo, twitter, etc) with influence or by building their vision of the future in a commercial context - look at Elon musk and bezos going to space or Bryan Johnson trying to live forever and selling vitamins along the way.
When we do get billionaires donating, and they become unpopular, people try to penalize the institutions. Like the Zuckerberg general hospital getting petitioned to change their name.
Agreed! I think that's what I was getting at with historical differences in tax policy. It's interesting some of the former gilded age estates in the northeast that have become public parks of one form or another, for similar reasons.
> When we do get billionaires donating, and they become unpopular, people try to penalize the institutions. Like the Zuckerberg general hospital getting petitioned to change their name.
To me this always seemed like broken brain syndrome. If you don't like some rich guy, the best possible outcome is that some public good extracts wealth from him that taxes have failed to do. Would we be better off if he kept the money? These people get too hung up on letting the perfect (billionaires shouldn't exist!) get in the way of the good (billionaire funding a hospital).
Endgame: After creating a language that encourages programmers to make robust and optimal software, using a toolchain that exemplifies these ideals by providing an order of magnitude faster development iteration speed, point this energy towards the ecosystem, with a focus on our core principle of prioritizing the needs of end users. Building upon this rich ecosystem of high quality software, create and maintain free, libre, and open-source applications that outcompete proprietary versions. I want to see the next Blender, the next Postgresql, the next Linux. This is my vision.
Mitchell's Ghostty project is a perfect example of this movement. At least, it will be when it is open sourced.
> I want to see the next Blender, the next Postgresql, the next Linux. This is my vision.
Do you think it makes sense to augment these existing (and successful) open source projects with Zig (language and/or toolchain)? Or should something grassroots and written primarily in Zig be their eventual successor?
Now that you mention it I forgot an important one! I want to see the next VLC. And in fact J-B has mentioned on IRC that he would be interested to see contributions to the project using Zig.
This is one of the shining features of the language: either of these is a viable option. Zig is a great way to build C projects, with native cross-compiling, and the semantics make it straightforward to supply a C API for Zig libraries to add to existing code in C. Depending on the specifics, it can make sense for a C codebase to switch to Zig's build system just for excellent cross compilation, without writing anything in Zig.
I think once Zig stops being a moving target, we'll see an increasing number of C codebases writing some of the new code in Zig, moving over to the build system, and taking it from there. There are a lot of decisions which make this easy. As an example, idiomatic Zig code which allocates memory receives an Allocator, where C uses malloc and free. So there's a C allocator, which provides the Allocator interface to malloc and free, meaning Zig code can create objects and pass the memory to C, which can free it later.
There's a lot of C code out there which is working just fine, and if it ain't broke, no need to fix it. But if it's easy to do new work in a nicer language (to my taste, Zig is definitely that), why not? Then maybe rewrite some preprocessor-heavy C code using comptime.
The main thing holding this back (though it's already happening) is that Zig is pre-1.0. That imposes a maintenance burden which not everyone is willing to take on. But that won't last forever.
We don't have VC money so the only endgame is to gift Zig to people who happen to find it an effective tool, so that they can make more software you can love.
I think Zig is definitely an alternative for programmers who are too dumb to grok idiomatic Rust - sadly I am one of them. Go is more meant for middleware and services programming and is a simple, consistent language that won't go away as it has now been enterprise adopted.
No, the plan is to build a simple general purpose language. Lots of folks already enjoy using Zig, and not every language has to be in direct competition with others.
I don't remember Java ever had an endgame during the late 90s or early 00s. There were certainly a lot of ambitious. But on the whole we know or assumed about its ( JVM ) limitations.
There were also languages before or in between. But I dont record any one of them ever had an End Game plan. This phenomenon is entirely new and doesn't exist until certain language's supporter came out. And it has now somewhat popularised by it.
Because the Rust community has to eliminate the entire landscape of programming languages—they're like those obnoxious, arrogant vegans that make a lot of noise but have very little real-world respect or credibility.
Meanwhile it is already shipping on Android Linux regardless of upstream, while Microsoft ships it on Windows, is making use of TockOS for firmware like on Pluton security CPU.
To be fair, he said the Rust community has little real-world respect. Linux considering the inclusion of Rust on technical merit is unrelated to the bunch of yahoos who have made a certain technology their identity.
I have a hard time believing that as well. What is the definition of community? Is it the RIIR fanboys? Is it /r/rust? Is it users.rust-lang.org?
Each of these subcommunities is quite sizable, and the last two definitely make an effort to squash RIIR-type overzealotry.
If you're still going to define the Rust community by the latter, it would be fair game to define the C/C++ community by the very vocal people who insist that there's nothing wrong with the lack of memory-safety in those languages.
You've precisely pinpointed the nuance that seems to elude so many: the distinction between the technical merits of Rust and the often overzealous antics of its most ardent adherents.
It's amusing how some conflate corporate adoption with universal admiration for a community's demeanor. Perhaps if more could separate the tool from its torchbearers, we'd have fewer misguided defenses and more meaningful discourse.
This is wrong. There is a lot of respect for rust, being used by Microsoft, Google, etc. (and i'd argue its a bad thing because it's stifling innovation and sucking up a lot of air for people who want temporal memory safety without all the... technical baggage that rust cones with)
JFYI for anyone who may not know, the donor is the co-founder of HashiCorp which was acquired by IBM earlier this year for $6B https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/hashicorp-joins-ibm
He wrote about the donation on his own blog as well https://mitchellh.com/writing/zig-donation
He is also writting a terminal emulator called ghostty with zig: https://mitchellh.com/ghostty
Wish I was on the beta, devlog entries look cool. In depth and nerdy.
Worth noting the merger is announced but neither (edit: regulatory) approved nor completed.
Yes, says Wikipedia.
Thank you, Mitchell Hashimoto. I have always wondered why folks who made their fortunes of technology do not give back consistently. You are part of the few folks such as Jan Koum, Gabriel Weinberg and I'm sure there others who I have failed to mentioned. Thank you.
Yeah agreed. You basically see small time donations, or boomers once they have their $50B+ pile of money pledging to give it away at death. Not a lot of big incremental giving in between by $100M-$1B class.
I mean Gates is doing good work on poverty & global health for sure, but hes quite the exception.
You don't see the durable institutions like new universities being setup like after the gilded age. Not sure if its a tax code thing or what.
One thought I've had, living in NYC, is that there are just businesses structured to take every incremental dollar out of you whether you are worth $0/$100K/$100M/$100B now. $100M condos in 5 different cities, $1M supercars, private jets, blade chopper from Manhattan to the jet, just so many ways to part fools from their cash.
For context, David Rockefeller's old NYC townhouse, which he lived in for 70 years, was for sale, post-renovation, for $50M or so. Rockefeller name synonymous with old money wealth.
These days though, a $50M apartment might not even crack the top 10 sales annually in 2020s NYC. New money is also hot money by comparison.. I really do think our vintage of wealthy are that much more rapacious.
In absolute value this is a fantastic contribution to support a very valuable project, and anybody who donates to Zig should be commended. It's one of a handful of projects that has a real chance of meaningfully pushing back against software bloat.
I do find it sobering to look at relative contribution, if for no other reason than to remind myself of the scales of money some are working with, and the out sized impact of having wealth. A $300k donation from a billionaire is loosely equivalent to somebody with $100k donating $30 (and likely has even less impact on quality of life!). We wouldn't have a hacker news article about such an event.
I should probably just shut up and go donate to Zig.
300k is 300k and the people receiving it won’t care if that’s chump change to the donor. Probably one of or the biggest donations the zigs foundation ever got. I don’t think it’s worth it making equivalences, I just commend it.
Of course, and I think it's fabulous. It's really just me being morose about how billionaires can throw this kind of money around in the same way a regular person might order a couple of pizzas.
There comes a certain point at which more money doesn't (short term) benefit the project much, and this says nothing about the (arguably) more worthy causes Hashimoto may have donated to.
> We wouldn't have a hacker news article about such an event.
If it were someone famous I bet we would, although granted it is unlikely that someone famous only has $100k.
We just don't like each other that much.
> You don't see the durable institutions like new universities being setup like after the gilded age. Not sure if it’s a tax code thing or what.
For a while, America was much more aware that you could just kill the rich like you killed kings. The rich gave away more and did more for society as a way of washing their reputation and proving they shouldn’t be killed in an uprising. Today, global society has become much more legally certain around perceptions of property rights and entitlement of the rich to their wealth.
If we saw genuine movements in America to (for example) tax wealth above 1B at like a 99% tax rate, I bet you’d suddenly see a few new well endowed universities and concert halls and similar.
Instead today, the wealthy are much more interested in showing off their reputation by buying media companies (WashPo, twitter, etc) with influence or by building their vision of the future in a commercial context - look at Elon musk and bezos going to space or Bryan Johnson trying to live forever and selling vitamins along the way.
When we do get billionaires donating, and they become unpopular, people try to penalize the institutions. Like the Zuckerberg general hospital getting petitioned to change their name.
Agreed! I think that's what I was getting at with historical differences in tax policy. It's interesting some of the former gilded age estates in the northeast that have become public parks of one form or another, for similar reasons.
> When we do get billionaires donating, and they become unpopular, people try to penalize the institutions. Like the Zuckerberg general hospital getting petitioned to change their name.
To me this always seemed like broken brain syndrome. If you don't like some rich guy, the best possible outcome is that some public good extracts wealth from him that taxes have failed to do. Would we be better off if he kept the money? These people get too hung up on letting the perfect (billionaires shouldn't exist!) get in the way of the good (billionaire funding a hospital).
This is also good news for https://bun.sh which is written in Zig.
That’s great to see, I’ve been using zig on and off for the past 3 years, I really like the language so I’m happy to see it gaining even more traction
This is great news. Zig is very promising. I got huge joy working with it. Good it got the recognition.
I read https://ziglang.org/learn/why_zig_rust_d_cpp/ but I’m still not clear on the endgame for this language. Is the plan to kill both Rust and Go?
Endgame: After creating a language that encourages programmers to make robust and optimal software, using a toolchain that exemplifies these ideals by providing an order of magnitude faster development iteration speed, point this energy towards the ecosystem, with a focus on our core principle of prioritizing the needs of end users. Building upon this rich ecosystem of high quality software, create and maintain free, libre, and open-source applications that outcompete proprietary versions. I want to see the next Blender, the next Postgresql, the next Linux. This is my vision.
Mitchell's Ghostty project is a perfect example of this movement. At least, it will be when it is open sourced.
> I want to see the next Blender, the next Postgresql, the next Linux. This is my vision.
Do you think it makes sense to augment these existing (and successful) open source projects with Zig (language and/or toolchain)? Or should something grassroots and written primarily in Zig be their eventual successor?
Now that you mention it I forgot an important one! I want to see the next VLC. And in fact J-B has mentioned on IRC that he would be interested to see contributions to the project using Zig.
Why contribute to a monopoly when you can lay the foundation for greener grass for more competitors?
There's arguments both ways; what it really boils down to is what you value.
This is one of the shining features of the language: either of these is a viable option. Zig is a great way to build C projects, with native cross-compiling, and the semantics make it straightforward to supply a C API for Zig libraries to add to existing code in C. Depending on the specifics, it can make sense for a C codebase to switch to Zig's build system just for excellent cross compilation, without writing anything in Zig.
I think once Zig stops being a moving target, we'll see an increasing number of C codebases writing some of the new code in Zig, moving over to the build system, and taking it from there. There are a lot of decisions which make this easy. As an example, idiomatic Zig code which allocates memory receives an Allocator, where C uses malloc and free. So there's a C allocator, which provides the Allocator interface to malloc and free, meaning Zig code can create objects and pass the memory to C, which can free it later.
There's a lot of C code out there which is working just fine, and if it ain't broke, no need to fix it. But if it's easy to do new work in a nicer language (to my taste, Zig is definitely that), why not? Then maybe rewrite some preprocessor-heavy C code using comptime.
The main thing holding this back (though it's already happening) is that Zig is pre-1.0. That imposes a maintenance burden which not everyone is willing to take on. But that won't last forever.
We don't have VC money so the only endgame is to gift Zig to people who happen to find it an effective tool, so that they can make more software you can love.
I think Zig is definitely an alternative for programmers who are too dumb to grok idiomatic Rust - sadly I am one of them. Go is more meant for middleware and services programming and is a simple, consistent language that won't go away as it has now been enterprise adopted.
No, the plan is to build a simple general purpose language. Lots of folks already enjoy using Zig, and not every language has to be in direct competition with others.
I don't remember Java ever had an endgame during the late 90s or early 00s. There were certainly a lot of ambitious. But on the whole we know or assumed about its ( JVM ) limitations.
There were also languages before or in between. But I dont record any one of them ever had an End Game plan. This phenomenon is entirely new and doesn't exist until certain language's supporter came out. And it has now somewhat popularised by it.
Why would it need to kill anything? It’s enough to be useful, imo.
Because the Rust community has to eliminate the entire landscape of programming languages—they're like those obnoxious, arrogant vegans that make a lot of noise but have very little real-world respect or credibility.
Yes, Rust which is under consideration as the first ever non-C language in the kernel, has very little real-world respect.
JFC, I can get that sometimes Rust folks can be obnoxious and overbearing, but IME it's the "never-rust" crowd that are more obnoxious.
Meanwhile it is already shipping on Android Linux regardless of upstream, while Microsoft ships it on Windows, is making use of TockOS for firmware like on Pluton security CPU.
If Linux upstream doesn't care, it is their loss.
To be fair, he said the Rust community has little real-world respect. Linux considering the inclusion of Rust on technical merit is unrelated to the bunch of yahoos who have made a certain technology their identity.
I have a hard time believing that as well. What is the definition of community? Is it the RIIR fanboys? Is it /r/rust? Is it users.rust-lang.org?
Each of these subcommunities is quite sizable, and the last two definitely make an effort to squash RIIR-type overzealotry.
If you're still going to define the Rust community by the latter, it would be fair game to define the C/C++ community by the very vocal people who insist that there's nothing wrong with the lack of memory-safety in those languages.
You've precisely pinpointed the nuance that seems to elude so many: the distinction between the technical merits of Rust and the often overzealous antics of its most ardent adherents.
It's amusing how some conflate corporate adoption with universal admiration for a community's demeanor. Perhaps if more could separate the tool from its torchbearers, we'd have fewer misguided defenses and more meaningful discourse.
This is wrong. There is a lot of respect for rust, being used by Microsoft, Google, etc. (and i'd argue its a bad thing because it's stifling innovation and sucking up a lot of air for people who want temporal memory safety without all the... technical baggage that rust cones with)
Well that is something you definitely don't get with Zig, unless using runtime analysis just like C and C++ have been doing for decades.
Use after free is a reality in Zig.