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Zig Software Foundation 2024 Financial Report and Fundraiser

by quic5 on 1/18/24, 2:37 PM with 38 comments

• by emidoots on 1/18/24, 7:24 PM

  Myself and many others are betting on Zig in major ways, I truly think it has a bright future ahead.

  In spare time, myself and a few others are working on a game engine in Zig[0], and the Zig core team has been very receptive to addressing issues our project faces and supporting us.

  Others are working on pixel art editors[1], open source 2D RPG games[2], there's a group of independent folks working on a 3D massive immersive sim game[3], a group working on making Zig an amazing language for micro-controllers[4], etc.

  Please consider donating $5-10 a month to the ZSF! They are a great group of people, and it has so many knock-on effects for others in the FOSS community. :)

  [0] https://machengine.org/

  [1] https://github.com/foxnne/pixi

  [2] https://github.com/foxnne/aftersun

  [3] https://github.com/Srekel/tides-of-revival

  [4] https://github.com/ZigEmbeddedGroup

• by jmull on 1/18/24, 5:32 PM

  As someone who's been contributing $10/mo for a couple years, I'd like to see AK and contractors paid more.

  It's great to see the dollars spent so frugally (they are paying something like 60-65% market of average devs) but this is a long-term project so sustainability cannot be ignored. Sooner or later contributors will face tough life choices.

  Obviously, that means slower development unless funding shoots up for some reason, and 1.0 already seems far away, but I think otherwise there's too high a risk that it never happens or happens in an ultimately un-useful way.

  Anyway, I always thought this project was valuable (that's why I started supporting it), but since I've been following it, I've found I also like the way it is run so I guess I should put my money where my mouth is... I just went up to $15/mo.

  I honestly can't predict whether or not this will succeed, but I'm pretty sure it's worth a try.

• by sitkack on 1/18/24, 4:15 PM

  We are all better off for Zig existing, even if we don’t directly use it. That is why I donate. The information density being in the Goldilocks Zone is a masterful quality of the Zig society.

  I am going to both increase my donation and figure out how to hookup my corporate matching, didn’t know that was possible.

  Base for everyone!

• by pid-1 on 1/18/24, 4:36 PM

  > We spent 92% of our money in 2023 on paying contributors for their time.

  That's really cool. Sometimes I think about donating to the PSF, but I don't really care about PyCon.

• by geodel on 1/18/24, 5:26 PM

  This is extremely impressive. With about no support from software industries' heavy hitters, they are able to run quite successful foundation and project.

  Few days back there was topic "Rust contributor's burnout" here on HN. I understand it maybe a sensitive topic but from outside it feels contributors working on Zig seem generally happy and excited about their contributions. And I think this is more important than number of features crammed or 1.0 release deadline committed to.

• by infamouscow on 1/18/24, 3:48 PM

  I'll be increasing my Zig donations as a result of making the financials very transparent and easily accessible.

  The Zig Software Foundation is very organized and has their stuff together. Hopefully other languages follow the ZSF's lead.

• by nbittich on 1/18/24, 6:03 PM

  I wish the rust foundation could write articles like that, no corporate legal bullshit.

• by matu3ba on 1/18/24, 8:40 PM

  A more recent example of excellent work with Zig on improving state of the art parsing can be seen in this fine presentation of a SIMD-heavy project: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oN8LDpWuPWw. It shows SWAR-techiques for embedded devices to be used in place of SIMD are useful + feasible and missed out LLVM optimizations on non-x86/x86_64 besides technical background and theory on simplified examples.

• by xcdzvyn on 1/20/24, 12:11 AM

  It's very interesting to see Uber betting on Zig, let alone the income it generates. This certainly benefited my faith in Zig's long-term sustainability.

• by nindalf on 1/18/24, 5:32 PM

  I really hope Zig succeeds! Of all the languages out there, I think it's the closest to achieving the goal of being C, but without the avoidable footguns. Rust is great too, but is different enough that I can imagine a future where both Zig and Rust easily succeed.

  I hope they're able to raise the money they need to fulfil their ambitious roadmap!

• by jonahx on 1/20/24, 4:36 AM

  "Some of this cost is for hosting ziglang.org. Since our free AWS credits have expired we have plans to switch to Fastly which should save about $500/month."

  Just curious why a static site would cost so much even on AWS? Would it be many downloads of large-ish binary files?

• by binary132 on 1/18/24, 4:57 PM

  I have a hard time justifying faith in and donation to Zig when I don’t see reaching production quality as having a high priority for the project over the years. I am hopeful that will eventually change and it will some day even be able to compete with C, C++, and Rust.

• by synergy20 on 1/18/24, 3:51 PM

  I never understand why fundamental work which is super hard to do got paid so little, the whole budget of Zig might be less than an average senior software developer's salary at a FAANG company, this does not make sense to me at all.

  On the other hand, what's the timeline for 1.0? I might stick with C and C++, but always glad to see Zig to succeed.