(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).
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.
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
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.
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.
* 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.
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?
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.
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".
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.
https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/2025.html (the entry under 19b)
It seems this was a right vs. left (or liberal) split.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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++.
(You won't have to seek long in his HN history to find an instance of such behavior)