It's very interesting to see Uber betting on Zig, let alone the income it generates. This certainly benefited my faith in Zig's long-term sustainability.
This is in fact a good strategization for the ZSF because Zig kinda needs all the work for `zig cc` anyway but `zig cc` can be sold without Zig itself. The next question is then, why something like `zig cc` didn't exist before? It's more complicated to answer...
Traditionally cross-compilation needed a separate copy of everything per target, which is really annoying but not really impossible. Any large enough company would therefore just build an infrastructure and put dedicated employees for cross-compilation. Tools like `zig cc` would benefit the rest---smaller companies and individuals---but you can't really expect those to kickstart the development of such tools from the beginning. Thankfully, `zig cc` was born as a byproduct so it had time to mature within the Zig project. And given we now have a working `zig cc`, larger companies can consider `zig cc` and possibly donate to the ZSF, even if that's only for `zig cc`.
> Uber uses Zig to compile its C/C++ code.
> Uber does not have any plans to use zig-the-language yet.
https://jakstys.lt/2022/how-uber-uses-zig/