I'm pretty sure they'll miss the full developer salary that Oven used to sponsor them, which they no longer do.
I'd wager one doesn't do a rewrite like that, if you are in great personal standing with the language foundation.
That same "just don't use it" attitude was what drove me away from Zig btw. I would have been fine in restricting myself to a somewhat stable subset, e.g. if, loop + function calls, but they didn't want to provide any tiered stability guarantees for the language.
Opinionated is great, no local minima is great, but you have to accept that if you don't want to engage with the needs of your (professional) community then what you do is a hobby project. A very cool hobby project beloved by thousands, but a hobby project.
I'm not expecting the whole language to be stable, but I expect certain parts of it to be more stable than others. E.g. control flow vs. async.
I'm not saying that they can't work that way, more power to them. But then having the expectation of anybody using it in a professional setting is also unrealistic. You can't have your cake and eat it too, either it's your personal project and you are fine with nobody using it but you, or you evangelise for people to use it, but then you also need to make at least some effort to not break their stuff on a whim, or to accept their change requests when they put in the work as was apparently the case for bun.
Tbh I don't see Zig hit 1.0 with a meaningful user-base, it's probably going to mostly get eaten by Rust or some other language and will continue to exist as a niche thing, kinda like D.
Having one of the flagship/showcase codebases rewritten to Rust in a week feels like a death knell. Either the community or the language is too unworkable if someone that heavily invested into it jumps ship, and I'm afraid it's kinda both.
Having tried both, I think Zig is a replacement for C, while Rust is a replacement for C++.
One thing Zig has that lots of "niche" languages don't is that you can include C headers directly. This means if you want to make a game in SDL, for example, you don't need to wait until someone ports SDL to your new language. You can just include SDL.h directly and start using it. D also has this feature, by the way, but Rust requires you to generate the bindings.
Even if people move from Zig to Rust for some things or vice-versa, the strengths of Zig remain there.
I know these strengths, I've written Zig fulltime for ~1 year before switching to Rust, and I do miss comptime pretty much every day.
Still in my experience the strengths do not outweigh the weaknesses.
I'd also push back on the narrative that Rust is not a C replacement. For one because that characterization based on surface level syntactic similarities misses the point of WHY you'd want to have a C replacement in the first place. And also because if this whole situation has shown anything it's that if you want to generate the "extern C" boilerplate in Rust, then these days it requires little more than "hey claude/codex please write the imports for this C library" or even "please port this C library to Rust".
I'm pretty sure they'll miss the full developer salary that Oven used to sponsor them, which they no longer do. I'd wager one doesn't do a rewrite like that, if you are in great personal standing with the language foundation.
That same "just don't use it" attitude was what drove me away from Zig btw. I would have been fine in restricting myself to a somewhat stable subset, e.g. if, loop + function calls, but they didn't want to provide any tiered stability guarantees for the language.
Opinionated is great, no local minima is great, but you have to accept that if you don't want to engage with the needs of your (professional) community then what you do is a hobby project. A very cool hobby project beloved by thousands, but a hobby project.
I think if you use a programming language that is clearly version zero you can't complain that it's not stable...
I'm not expecting the whole language to be stable, but I expect certain parts of it to be more stable than others. E.g. control flow vs. async.
I'm not saying that they can't work that way, more power to them. But then having the expectation of anybody using it in a professional setting is also unrealistic. You can't have your cake and eat it too, either it's your personal project and you are fine with nobody using it but you, or you evangelise for people to use it, but then you also need to make at least some effort to not break their stuff on a whim, or to accept their change requests when they put in the work as was apparently the case for bun.
Tbh I don't see Zig hit 1.0 with a meaningful user-base, it's probably going to mostly get eaten by Rust or some other language and will continue to exist as a niche thing, kinda like D.
Having one of the flagship/showcase codebases rewritten to Rust in a week feels like a death knell. Either the community or the language is too unworkable if someone that heavily invested into it jumps ship, and I'm afraid it's kinda both.
Having tried both, I think Zig is a replacement for C, while Rust is a replacement for C++.
One thing Zig has that lots of "niche" languages don't is that you can include C headers directly. This means if you want to make a game in SDL, for example, you don't need to wait until someone ports SDL to your new language. You can just include SDL.h directly and start using it. D also has this feature, by the way, but Rust requires you to generate the bindings.
Even if people move from Zig to Rust for some things or vice-versa, the strengths of Zig remain there.
I know these strengths, I've written Zig fulltime for ~1 year before switching to Rust, and I do miss comptime pretty much every day.
Still in my experience the strengths do not outweigh the weaknesses.
I'd also push back on the narrative that Rust is not a C replacement. For one because that characterization based on surface level syntactic similarities misses the point of WHY you'd want to have a C replacement in the first place. And also because if this whole situation has shown anything it's that if you want to generate the "extern C" boilerplate in Rust, then these days it requires little more than "hey claude/codex please write the imports for this C library" or even "please port this C library to Rust".