[littlestymaar]

The key problem with Zig nowadays is how much of its community and adoption is driven by anti-Rust sentiment. As a result, while Rust puts beginner onboarding and documentation at the center of its culture, as opposed to the “C neckbeard”'s culture, Zig is going the other way around.

(Loris Cro being a key community figure isn't helping in any way, and it's a good remainder that if you don't clear up your community from bullies from the beginning, they will turn your entire community to a miserable place. And that's a shame because from what I've seen, Andrew Kelley seems to be a very cool guy in addition to being very smart).

[kristoff_it]

> The key problem with Zig nowadays is how much of its community and adoption is driven by anti-Rust sentiment. As a result, while Rust puts beginner onboarding and documentation at the center of its culture, as opposed to the “C neckbeard”'s culture, Zig is going the other way around.

Maybe, or maybe the fact that Zig is a small independent project with limited resources has also something to do with it, and this kind of shaming says less about Zig than you'd think.

When I first joined the Zig project, Zig was still using the bootstrap compiler written in C++ that would not free memory (it took more than 4GB to compile the Zig compiler). Some people at the time were asking us to prioritize work on the package manager but Andrew rightfully wanted to prioritize rewriting the compiler instead. In hindsight this was the obviously right decision: a package manager implies that one can very easily add an order of magnitude more code to their project, stressing the performance of the compiler. If we had not prioritized core infrastructure over giving people what they wanted faster, today we would have people complaining that adding a single dependency to their project makes the build impossible to complete.

The Zig project has a huge scope and we are a small independent organization. This makes us extremely nimble and efficient, but it does mean that we need to do things in the order that makes the most sense for the project, not for what the public wants.

The fact that we develop in the open doesn't mean that the language is ready yet.

People that already have the required domain knowledge (and who have a tolerance for breaking changes) will have the opportunity to be early adopters if they wish to do so, others will have to wait for Zig to become more mature. And we do make this clear in releases and all forms of public communication.

We have gone a long way since the bootstrap compiler days, but we are still missing key infrastructure:

- we have a x86_64 custom backend but aarch64 is not complete yet - incremental compilation is showing that we can get instant rebuilds of large projects, but it has missing features and it doesn't work on all platforms yet - we need native fuzzing since AFL keeps regressing everytime a new version of LLVM comes out - for the longest time we haven't had a strong I/O story, now we're finally working on it

The time for paving the road for a new generation of programmers will come (it's in the ZSF mission statement btw), but first we need to finish the plumbing.

[mirashii]

> Maybe, or maybe the fact that Zig is a small independent project with limited resources has also something to do with it

Or, maybe it's this kind of redirection and evidence of a victim complex. Part of the reason that there's a patina of anti-Rust sentiment includes the dismissive attitude and swipes you, a the VP of Community at the Zig Software Foundation, take towards Rust and Rust developers by writing about topics you aren't involved in and don't have a solid grasp of.

https://kristoff.it/blog/raii-rust-linux/ https://lobste.rs/s/hxerht/raii_rust_linux_drama#c_gbn1q8

Or similarly, comments like this one in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=44994749

[hitekker]

Much of that bad blood comes from how Rust's leadership attacks other programming languages, online and offline.

pcwalton infamously declared zig was "a massive step back for the industry" https://x.com/pcwalton/status/1568306598795431936?s=46&t=OCi.... He and the Rust Core Team had a big reputation for burning bridges. Even to this day, the new Rust leaders are happy to attack other memory safe languages like Go, declaring them "not memory safe" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4467200

I think Kristoff remembers these attacks, and crucially how very few voices within the Rust community push back against Rust supremacism.

[zozbot234]

> infamously declared zig was "a massive step back for the industry"

> [Golang] "not memory safe"

Both of these are entirely fair assessments, not "attacks". Golang really does have memory safety issues with concurrent code, and a memory-unsafe language like Zig is a step back even compared to Java/C#, let alone Rust.

[hitekker]

It's an entirely fair assessment within a framework of supremacism. "My language is the best. People who don't use it need to learn it. If they don't, they're bad programmers, maybe even bad people." It's a ugly spirit that no one is honest enough to admit to. But it's there. A few month ago, I saw a supposedly nice Rust leader calling SQLite "a terrible example of anything other than what you can accomplish when you pour enormous resources into a single C library."

The end result is that Rust's leaders either avoid interacting with other languages, or engage in flamewars. I think it's a big reason why Java, the most popular and successful memory safe language in the world, has little-to-no formal contacts with the Rust team.

[baranul]

There are a couple things about that take, that many would say deserves push back on: (1) Rust supremacism has been aimed at many other languages, not just Zig in particular. It's been a wide spray. (2) Many would say that Zig's leadership has done similar to what you are saying about Rust. Very clear examples have been the relentless unleashing on Vlang and its creator, and to a lesser extent on C3.

What might be the better critique about this, is that any programming language's leadership should not be engaging in that kind of bad behavior. And any ill words coming from them about another language, should always be taken with a grain of salt and seen as likely bias.

[littlestymaar]

“Zig not being memory safe” is what's being called “a massive setback for the industry”.

Maybe you can make a hierarchy between technical criticism like this and the fact that Go isn't technically memory-safe[1], with Loris' abusive behavior of calling Rust maintainers names like “wankers”…

[1]: which is a criticism mostly coming from the Java crowd, by the way, not Rust, like the criticism of the simplistic garbage collection management in Go

[mi_lk]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4467200 is not about Go/memory safe btw

[hitekker]

Good catch, the link should go to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44672003 (the 3 was missing)

[littlestymaar]

> Rust supremacism.

I can't believe you really wrote that.

[hitekker]

It's true. Or rather, it's the emergent behavior of the community. Other languages typically don’t openly say, in writing:

> Then [Anti Rust person] should have been perma-banned long ago [on an open forum]. Until this is done, we'll have to warn people about engaging with him…

You can hate kristoff, ignore him or attack his arguments. You can also love a piece of software and treat it as sacred. But other people should not be subjected to that love nor should they be canceled on account of it. Flag it or downvote. Beyond that, it's outside of our control.

I do agree though that kristoff should focus on Zig and not indulge in provoking old enemies. His valid points— deferring premature documentation for newbies until concepts are ironed out— are being lost in programming language holy wars.

[littlestymaar]

> Other languages typically don’t openly say, in writing:

I'm no language though…

> You can hate kristoff, ignore him or attack his arguments. You can also love a piece of software and treat it as sacred.

It's not about “love” or “being sacred” or even about Rust or Zig, it is about behaving in society. Most successful communities at some point meet toxic people who want to start holly wars and insult people. Successful communities are the one who ban those people, or at least coerce them into behaving through social pressure.

When you don't do that, you end up with bullies like Loris occupying prominent positions, and that's very bad for the community because it attracts people like that.

It has nothing to do with programming languages at all.

And sorry to say that bluntly, your discourse about “supremacism” “love” or “sacred” sounds very immature: programming languages are tools and engineering projects, not icons that should be worshipped or hated, they all have their strong points and warts (and god knows Rust has its share of annoyances…). Don't get dragged in holy wars by cult leaders like Loris.

[baranul]

This Zig victim complex, smells of clear hypocrisy, as can be easily seen by their swipes and harassment of other programming languages, like V (Vlang).

It reflects poorly on any leadership engaging in that kind of bad and unprofessional behavior, and it eventually backfires on any project or person. People eventually notice it and figure out the foul things that have been or is being done, then demand accountability or walk away from the toxicity.

[littlestymaar]

Loris really isn't a person worth engaging with honestly, don't waste your time.

[hardwaresofton]

Personal attacks like this have no place on HN.

[littlestymaar]

Then Loris should have been perma-banned long ago. Until this is done, we'll have to warn people about engaging with him…

[cztomsik]

NOBODY should EVER be perma-banned just because you disagree with them! What the hell?

[mirashii]

I just wanted to clarify that I point this out to say that there was a real opportunity in this thread to try to push back on the language wars perception. To me, good community management would be taking the opportunity to say:

  * Sorry you feel that way, we try not to foster an inclusive environment that avoids language flamewars and negativity towards other languages
  * Some specific examples of policies that are enacted in community spaces towards that end (e.g. some large programming language discord servers have specific rules against low effort language bashing content and memes)
  * Take the opportunity to link back to positive things that the Zig team has said about Rust and places where folks have recommended it.

Instead, we got a shallow dismissal and redirection, which unfortunately starts to look like a pattern, especially when coming from a person who's in a leadership position in the community being discussed.

[adwn]

> […] Zig was still using the bootstrap compiler written in C++ that would not free memory […]

That sounds strange. Modern C++ requires very little manual memory management, at least when you're writing something high-level like a compiler. C++11 had been out for years when development on Zig started. Were they writing C++ old-school as C-with-classes and malloc() everywhere? Why not use a more appropriate language for the first prototype of a compiler for a brand new language?

[messe]

IIRC, it was a performance thing, and it's not an uncommon pattern in CLI tools. Freeing memory can actually cost you performance, so why not just let the OS clean up for you at exit(2)?

[adwn]

> IIRC, it was a performance thing […]

Why would you care about these kinds of micro-optimizations at that stage of development, when you don't even know what exactly you need to build? We're not talking about serious algorithmic improvements like turning O(n²) into O(n) here.

> Freeing memory can actually cost you performance, so why not just let the OS clean up for you at exit(2)?

Because a compiler is not some simple CLI tool with a fixed upper bound on resource consumption.

[throwawaymaths]

> Why would you care about these kinds of micro-optimizations

it turns out that compiler speed is bound by a bunch of things, and it's death by a thousand cuts. If you have a slow compiler, and it takes forever to compile your compiler, your language becomes scelerotic, no one wants to make changes, and your language gets stuck in shitty choices.

> Because a compiler is not some simple CLI tool with a fixed upper bound on resource consumption

yes. thats right. a compiler is complex and should use several different allocation strategies for different parts. if your language steers you towards using malloc for everything then your compiler (assuming it's bootstrapped) will suffer, because sometimes there are better choices than malloc.

[adwn]

You're losing sight of the full picture: This "optimization" was such a hindrance that they had to rewrite the compiler before they could work on the ecosystem of their new language. From kristoff_it's comment [1]:

> When I first joined the Zig project, Zig was still using the bootstrap compiler written in C++ that would not free memory (it took more than 4GB to compile the Zig compiler). Some people at the time were asking us to prioritize work on the package manager but Andrew rightfully wanted to prioritize rewriting the compiler instead. In hindsight this was the obviously right decision: a package manager implies that one can very easily add an order of magnitude more code to their project, stressing the performance of the compiler. If we had not prioritized core infrastructure over giving people what they wanted faster, today we would have people complaining that adding a single dependency to their project makes the build impossible to complete.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44994886

[pjmlp]

Not only, the whole handmade movement puts me off.

It is the anti-intelectualism from Go culture, gone wild against C++, Rust, Swift, anything modern, or even tools, using game engines versus doing the whole computer from scratch for a game.

[kristoff_it]

Zig is not really a handmade project, case in point both Andrew and I are blocked on social media by the two gods of the handmade movement (casey and john) and, according to their die hard fans, Andrew gave a talk at the last handmade conference that caused the community to split apart (the reality is a bit more complex than this, but Andrew's talk is certainly one that you wouldn't see at their new "better software" conference).

Andrew's talk is here (second event after the two people chatting while sitting on chairs): https://handmadecities.com/media/seattle-2024/hms-day-one/

Here you can see a particularly funny (but also sad) reaction by one of these people https://drive.proton.me/urls/MB1EB4EF34#YZdvmAvBFp1C

> using game engines versus doing the whole computer from scratch for a game

That said you are doing yourself a disservice if you think that not using an engine to make a game is a form of "anti-intellectualism".

[pjmlp]

Thanks for clarification.

Depends on the attitude, not using an engine, because one wants to learn the whole stack, makes all sense, after all people need to learn how to make game engines, if nothing else for the next generation.

Not using one out of spite, because we do everything handmade over here attitude, is a completely different matter.

[brodo]

Here is another comment on the whole Handmade-Kerfuffle from one of the presenters:

https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/2025.html (the entry under 19b)

It seems this was a right vs. left (or liberal) split.

[deagle50]

more like old school lib vs "new left"

[secondary_op]

Unfortunately for everyone, people like you tie their entire identity and income to specific technologies, movements, or communities—becoming deeply tribal in the process. When something or someone undermines their sense of security—even with constructive criticism—they react defensively, often to the point of ignorance.

All this, combined with the fact that Zig, at best is still in beta quality and at worst amounts to a massive waste of everyone’s time, makes it unsurprising that people block you and simply refuse to engage with your loud community efforts, endless churn and crust tied to beta quality compiler.

> Zig is not really a handmade project, case in point both Andrew and I are blocked on social media by the two gods of the handmade movement (casey and john) and, according to their die hard fans, Andrew gave a talk at the last handmade conference that caused the community to split apart (the reality is a bit more complex than this, but Andrew's talk is certainly one that you wouldn't see at their new "better software" conference).

> Andrew's talk is here (second event after the two people chatting while sitting on chairs): https://handmadecities.com/media/seattle-2024/hms-day-one/

> Here you can see a particularly funny (but also sad) reaction by one of these people https://drive.proton.me/urls/MB1EB4EF34#YZdvmAvBFp1C

Regarding the links you posted:

In the first, at 2:30:40, Andrew Kelly publicly calls out a specific author of a competing technology in exaggerated, caricatured, and fabricated context.

In the second video, yet another author of a yet another competing technology directly points out this unapologetic and concerning behavior on Andrew Kelly’s part.

And now you—“VP of Community @ Zig Software Foundation”—assert your “righteous” stance by sharing these videos, while ironically pointing out that some of those same individuals (of competing technologies fame) block you on social media.

Too bad that doing your job probably means being as loud and visible online as possible to spread the molecules of Zig no matter what.

[baranul]

If you didn't know, Casey has made comments on a YouTube video, that he does not like Zig. His review of Zig, was that it's a language that he rather not use and would not recommend.

[bnolsen]

The anti rust sentiment in large part is dissatisfaction with rust itself. Ziglang.org lists 3 principles of zig: no hidden control flow, no hidden memory allocations, no macros. This is not anti rust for the sake of being anti rust, this is anti lots of popular languages, and I personally like it.

[littlestymaar]

That isn't “anti Rust” at all, it's just a different set of trade offs, and it's fine that it attracts developers who don't like the set of trade offs Rust make.

What's not very good are the people who don't like Rust, who are uneasy with Rust is eating the system programming world, and are now pushing Zig as the champion of the resistance about Rust.

It happens a lot, unfortunately.

[ksec]

That is actually a valid point on expectation given the attracted people's demographic.

I will hopefully wait for comments from Ghostty, Bun or Tigerbeetle Devs.

On another point that is wroth mentioning, I hope Andrew will at least put it out publicly, IMO Zig isn't Anti-Rust. But it did attract the type of people who are not too happy with Rust. I dont remember a single time Zig came out to bash anything about Rust. It isn't Anti anything at all. Its goal is to be a decent C replacement as very high level assembly languages, aiming at Data Oriented Design with some interesting features, and extremely fast compilation speed. ( Which was the reason why I was interested in it in the first place. I miss Turbo Pascal )

Zig reminds me of the old school, traditional projects. It isn't perfect for everything, it never claims to be, if you like it, use it. If not, there are plenty of options out there.

At least Ghostty Dev seems to be enjoying it almost every day.

[littlestymaar]

I don't think Andrew is anti-Rust. But Loris, whose hn profile says he's “vp of community of the zig software foundation” is as anti-Rust as you can get: he's pathologically obsessed by Rust and spent significant amount of energy outright insulting Rust maintainers here or on Twitter (when he's not buzzy writing anti-Rust rant on his blog).

But as you say, there's no reason why Zig ought to be anti-Rust, both language are are fresh attempts at low level programming, both highly opinionated and with very different philosophies and trade offs and both language can cohabit peacefully (I've heard good things about using the Zig toolchain for cross compilation of C dependencies in rust projects, so the existence of Zig already has had a positive impact on the Rust ecosystem).

[geodel]

Huh, it all started with a Rust developer ceaselessly picking on Zig been memory-unsafe on social media. It would be one thing to write some technical post and be done with it but this obsession with Zig by Rust dev was infuriating to put it mildly. The same dev was very anti-Go in past and would post endless comments on Go here and elsewhere.

[littlestymaar]

I used to follow pcwalton on Twitter back then (before it became a nazi bar) and that's a complete mischaracterization.

While he can get petty when talking about memory safety, he was never obsessed by Zig in any way, his tweet that ended up with Loris calling him “Coomer” among other names was a response to someone mentioning that Zig wasn't memory safe. I've never seen him mentioning Zig first on Twitter.

And on the other hand you have Loris, obsessed so much by Rust he can't help spawning in Rust threads or write dumb anti-rust rants on his blog…

(In fairness, I must say that Loris isn't even the worst offender, that title goes to M. Presler, who keeps spawning every Rust thread telling everyone who want to hear it that Zig is much better, despite having seemingly no stakes in the game (being a Java guy and having no public Zig contribution or even documented use of the langage). Sounds like the “Rust evangelical strike force” emotionally hurt a bunch of people so much they became lifetime haters).

[TUSF]

> anti-Rust sentiment

I have not seen much of any anti-Rust sentiment in the community. There's a lot of people in the community who do Rust, like rust, and work on rust projects. If the Zig community has an anti-anything sentiment, it's against C++.

[littlestymaar]

Tell that to the “VP of community @ zig software foundation” who spend a significant fraction of its time insulting Rust maintainers or mere users here or on Twitter when he's not busy writing anti-Rust rants on his blog.

(You won't have to seek long in his HN history to find an instance of such behavior)