Comment by kristoff_it | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kristoff_it | Hacker News Reader

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Considering that the Zig Software Foundation not only doesn't have any big corporate backing, but also made an explicit point of always being fully independent, and the fact that we're overall doing fine, I beg to disagree.

https://ziglang.org/zsf/

Big tech wants you to think that you're nothing without them, while in truth there are plenty of situations where small realities can absolutely out-compete them:

https://kristoff.it/blog/the-open-source-game/

If you want a proxy variable to observe wrt Zig's growth, look at the star history on GitHub: we are today more popular than Rust was at our age.

https://star-history.com/#ziglang/zig&rust-lang/rust&Timelin...

...and in fact some big tech companies are jumping on the bandwagon, like Uber, but that's an after-the-fact thing.

https://www.uber.com/en-US/blog/bootstrapping-ubers-infrastr...

> If Go weren't associated with Google, people would have laughed that language out of the room long ago.

Nah, Go gets right certain critical things, and that's why is popular. Being from Google doesn't guarantee anything, look at Dart for example.

https://kristoff.it/blog/why-go-and-not-rust/

> If you want a proxy variable to observe wrt Zig's growth, look at the star history on GitHub: we are today more popular than Rust was at our age.

Which does not say anything given Githubs growth and change in usage patterns from 2010 to today.

Rather, I would say Zig is lagging far behind Rust and it should have had multiples higher stars than Rust at the same time to be on "equal footing" given the multiples larger software community that exist today.

To be fair, Nim isn't dead either. It's steadily coming along, with new developers, features, and libraries all the time. Sure it hasn't had the meteoric growth of Rust, but it's still climbing.

"Considering that the Zig Software Foundation not only doesn't have any big corporate backing, but also made an explicit point of always being fully independent"

Zig has a VP of Community and it's important how the role promotes and evangelize the language for developers. Another example: Crystal appointment a new Community Manager recently, and now have developer "ambassadors" - to promotion the Crystal language. It's a shame that Nim has no equivalent role or initiave to grow the language community.

That also ties into governance. The VP of Community position exists because the creator of the Zig programming language decided to create a non-profit corporation for the language as soon as he went full time with it, and then made the VP of Community position be the first hire.

he probably exaggerated saying that without money you are nothing, but it's (imo) pretty undeniable that money can be a great springboard for a project of that magnitude

Dart is a no go especially because Google is not really backing it.

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