Their "VP of Community" wrote this in 2020: https://kristoff.it/blog/addio-redis/ I didn't come across it until 2022. Still, particularly that and other writing from him and others convinced me the Zig community is full of goobers. That's not so bad, I have my tastes in immature humor and can sometimes be a goober too, but the application in that post's clearly-marked over-the-top skit still is just bizarre and doesn't encourage me to interact with them. To be more fair to the author and the community though, especially with respect to this GitHub migration, his more serious writing is better: https://kristoff.it/blog/the-open-source-game/ (2021). Some nice things said about Rust and the Rust community, even. In that he outlines a core position of "software you can love" being what he wants to create and inspire people to create, and how tents like "big tech" and "open source" don't really cater to that. The migration off of GitHub is predictable in the sense that GitHub stopped being something a lot of people loved a while ago -- of course some still love it, this tent creates obvious tension. (Though I don't know that Codeberg is any better and worthy of love. A few libraries I use have migrated to it and it seems fine at least, though them using Anubis is annoying and I've gotten the fail page of "Internal Server Error: administrator has misconfigured Anubis." a number of times. It does not spark joy in me.)
someone called some indeterminate anonymous corporate group of people who actively participate in enshittification of a product “losers”. you call that specific private individual “rotten”.
Read this entire thread. There are over two dozen links with Andrew's own words and bullying behavior provided by other commenters.
This is only the billionth time he's said something like this. He's apologized for it in the past and said he'd change, but it clearly didn't stick.
He's a jerk and a bully like Linus.
This is the guy setting culture at Zig, which is undoubtedly why five people responded to me in this thread with homophobic remarks. His community feels emboldened to do that.
When your leader breaks the Code of Conduct and attacks people, it probably feels like a safe space for all sorts of hatred and vile behavior.
Totally toxic.
Andrew has had a chance to read this thread by now. He's had a chance to reflect on the awful things people have said. Ball's in his court.
This implies Zig culture is being poisoned by Andrew.
He's the leader, and everyone looks to him. If he behaves like an asshole, and few people call him out or hold him accountable, everyone else thinks that's okay. You then see other members of the community behaving in a similar manner.
Toxic culture breeds toxic behavior and people.
You don't see other open source communities doing this.
Like I said, "rotten from the head". The idiom is appropriate.
wow, and you’re still defending yourself with a lecture on how your words should be interpreted in such good faith. in this situation. and, to add to that, comparing to two dictators who separate children from their parents and close people in labour camps.
keep believing you fit the moral standard and insight to emotional nuance to impart your judgments onto others.
And a tu quoque without even knowing my opinion on the matter and calling me an enabler for calling out the irony of your responses, hiding your personal aggressiveness behind a veil of moral superiority. I will refrain from continuing on this thread, good luck with this pain you carry, I hope you find something positively creative to alleviate it.
I can't imagine being someone like Andrew, or any BDFL of a popular open source project, and having to deal with folks like this. Imagine posting a timed output of your compiler on a thread about a similar language's slow compiler and having someone cite this as bad behavior.
Anyway, the clear absurdity of this particular post aside, it's not OK to call other people monkeys. I make no statement on the quality of their engineering. But they're people! I'd hope to see a quiet dignity from the Zig folks here. They've done so much excellent work, and I'm sure it's frustrating to see what software can be and then have it sharply laid against what software often is. But kindness is always the way.
Thanks to everyone involved with Zig for their work and love of software!
It's completely fine for someone working on a programming language that is useful for some of the same things as Rust to compare that language to Rust, including in ways that make the language not seem as good. Indeed, this is useful information for someone who is using Rust and is considering using Zig (or vice-versa), or who is new to both languages and trying to figure out which is better for their use case.
In what way is the tone of the linked messages not appropriate? Rust is a programming language, not a sacred object. It's fine to say that a different programming language does something better than it, regardless of whether or not you're the developer of that language.
To be clear I like Rust and use it frequently and have for about as long as it's been publicly released, whereas I have only played around a little bit with Zig and I suspect I won't like it as much as Rust even when it's feature-complete. But I don't like seeing an attempt to enforce a social norm that it's wrong to point out shortcomings of Rust, especially when it's aimed at people doing the interesting and valuable work of exploring other areas of the systems programming language design space that Rust is not doing.
