This is a huge loss for the zig language and community.
As a fan of the language, I hope it leads to some reflection on things that might need to change moving forward.
This is a huge loss for the zig language and community.
As a fan of the language, I hope it leads to some reflection on things that might need to change moving forward.
Nah, let the Zig foundation cook.
Both their AI policy and their rejection of Bun's performance PR were level-headed and well-reasoned. And the link seems more like a proof-of-concept than anything else.
It's true corporate sponsors are a big help with language development, but not at the expense of conceptual integrity.
The big loss for the Zig community would be if they stopped donating to ZSF. They have estranged themselves from it for a while.
Bun has stopped donating to the ZSF after the Anthropic acquisition.
I think it reflects more on Bun. [1].
[1] https://ziggit.dev/t/bun-s-zig-fork-got-4x-faster-compilatio...
Bun is the largest project written in zig. And it isn't close. Bun is bigger than zig itself. Seems like zig isn't mature enough to handle Bun's needs, so I don't blame them at all for looking for off ramps. Only time will tell if rigidity from the zig team is worth the cost of losing Bun. It might be.
Zig won't be affected by Bun potentially moving to Rust, the language has been growing rapidly and one of the main proposals of Zig is "maintain it with Zig". It's ability to integrate with existing C code bases, as well as be a drop-in build replacement, has widespread use.
In addition, the link in the comment you replied to explains why the PRs Bun opened to Zig would have lowered the quality of the compiler and how Zig has achieved even greater speedups, with more widely applicable features like incremental compilation and the self-hosted backend.
It is definitly worth it, and moving to rust because compile times are too slow ? This can't be the main reason for the switch