Wow. I think that's a serious mistake. Maybe GitHub is no longer so great and snappy but nowhere to justify moving something that needs: 1. Money, 2. Exposition, to something obscure just because it's a bit better. It's Git with an UI anyway, there isn't such large difference. I don't care about the fact the post is harsh: it's the content that it is broken from my POV because. It is absolutely legit to do something like that, in theory, but when you are handling a project that - at this point - is also the chosen language of a non trivial amount of folks, you need to act not just following what you like, but what is better for the project in the long time, and it is very hard to see how going away from GitHub (the fucking big market of open source software in the main city plaza -- let's use the same post tones) is better for Zig. What I think it is better is, of course, not absolutely better, but let's zoom on this issue root cause. It is the classical developer intolerance for tool that are not "as they wish/think", which is very common among technical people, but is a POV, I mean this "tool oriented" workflow, where this little feature/customization matters so much in your life (instead of adapting a bit and do not care), that I believe is a problem in our industry, and also has effects on the design philosophy of many programmers, that are too details oriented. Coders spend the majority of their life in the terminal, not on in GitHub. To check issues / PR there is not this Stranger Things Upside Down nightmare.
Another problem with that is that you know what you are leaving, but you don't really know what you find in the new place. GitHub used to go down often in the early days. Now they may not be snappy and unfortunately like 99% of the web felt for this Javascript framework craziness. But the site is always up, I bet has disaster recovery and serious backup policy, and so forth. Can you find this so obviously in other smaller places?
Speaking as the creator of one of the largest Zig projects, I agree with antirez
GitHub Actions are seriously broken and that alone is a technically sound enough reason to move: the sleep.sh bullshit has degraded the performance of our CI for a long time, as it regularly livelocks in an endless while(true) spin runner agents, who stop processing new jobs. The agent itself has poor platform support also because it has a runtime dependency on .NET, and lately GH Actions started running jobs out of order with the result that old jobs would starve and time out, causing PRs to turn up red for no real reason.
It's a real problem to run a project like Zig if your CI doesn't work. I guess we could have paid for an external CI service, but that as well would depend on GitHub APIs, so we would have gained what, a couple years? Given the current trajectory of GitHub I wouldn't trust them to maintain those APIs correctly for any longer than that (and as far as I know the current vibe-scheduling issues might already be reflected in the APIs that third party CI providers would use).
Let's not forget that "GitHub is an AI company now".
As a side note, people said that not posting anymore on Twitter and leaving Reddit was also a death sentence for Zig. Time has passed and we're still alive so far, while in the meantime both platforms have started their final journey towards the promised lands of the elves.
They won't get there tomorrow or the next month, but I'm sure there has been a time where people started moving from Sourceforge to GitHub and somebody else remarked that they were doing something needlessly risky.
As far as we can tell Codeberg is a serious attempt at a non-profit code sharing platform and we feel optimistic enough about its future that we're willing to bet on it.
I hope the best for Zig, Loris. But even if Zig will survive and prosper (I hope for both), still I believe this is not a sounding decision and not the right attitude. I hope I'm wrong, but I wanted to share with you my reasoning. Here you are moving away from the open source marketplace AND from your main revenue stream. It's not similar to not posting anymore to Twitter. A better parallel would be not posting anymore on Hacker News anything Zig related, in terms of potential outcome.
We've been directing people to use other means to donate for a few years now, so GH Sponsors is not our main source of income anymore (and hasn't been for a while). It's still a significant chunk, but it's also not going to go away overnight.
> A better parallel would be not posting anymore on Hacker News anything Zig related, in terms of potential outcome.
I've been thinking about this lately and in my experience (having seen the effect of HN posts in the past when Zig was smaller vs now) the community is already big and vibrant enough that an HN post alone doesn't do too much of a difference. To be clear, I don't think that HN is losing relevance (unlike all the other big platforms mentioned earlier in this conversation), but our situation has changed.
People now are more and more learning about Zig though cool Zig projects, not by looking at yet another superficial language comparison blog post, which is the kind of content that tends to get to the top of HN more often than not.
More in general I think that your point about not pulling away from all the markeplaces of ideas is valid, but most of those marketplaces are not as good as they claim to be and we have the luxury to run a project that has a strong community connected to it, meaning that we won't be starved of attention or contributors by moving away from GitHub.
This whole situation has an interesting parallel with what's happening in our community wrt chat platforms, if we happen to be at the same tech event in person I'll be happy to share with you all the details :^)