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by simjnd 19 days ago
I don't think Zig community is triggered, I think only Zig's creator is triggered because he is afraid of people interpreting this as "Zig is unsuitable for X".

I think a lot of people will, but those who do probably weren't the target audience for Zig in the first place?

1 comments

Context matters. Big announcements and uninformed blog posts can kill your momentum.

I still remember the Twitter dev blog where they abandoned Ruby/Rails and the damage that did. It turned out Twitter was doing a lot of stupid things and there was a mismatch of tools and their goals. They loudly blamed the tools and people ate it up because Twitter was big, visible and adored at the time. Their conclusions bypassed most people’s ability to reason.

Anthropic/Bun are big, visible and adored…

I remember that. It was the first time I heard about Scala.

I saw a lot of RoR companies/users thinking “should we do the same?” without even realizing that they do not have the same twitter scalability problems.

It didn't even end there at Twitter.

The same engineer at Twitter decided early on that no distributed messaging technology was good enough for Twitter, so they wrote their own. It fell over and they threw it away and wrote their own again. It fell over and they threw it away and now they use mainstream tools.

Similar to Discord's migration from Go to Rust. The measurements and reasons they gave were true but even by the time of the migration, Go had already moved on and improved. They were using an old version of Go.

Rust might be the right choice for Discord, I've no idea about that, but the problem is that the blog post lives on and influences people to this day.