300k USD Donation Pledged by Mitchell Hashimoto

https://ziglang.org/news/300k-from-mitchellh/

by rc00 • 2 years ago

160 44 2 years ago

samspenc• 2 years ago

JFYI for anyone who may not know, the donor is the co-founder of HashiCorp which was acquired by IBM earlier this year for $6B https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/hashicorp-joins-ibm

He wrote about the donation on his own blog as well https://mitchellh.com/writing/zig-donation

steveBK1236• 2 years ago

Worth noting the merger is announced but neither (edit: regulatory) approved nor completed.

fuzztester• 2 years ago

Yes, says Wikipedia.

hiccuphippo• 2 years ago

He is also writting a terminal emulator called ghostty with zig: https://mitchellh.com/ghostty

djbusby• 2 years ago

Wish I was on the beta, devlog entries look cool. In depth and nerdy.

popularonion• 2 years ago

I read https://ziglang.org/learn/why_zig_rust_d_cpp/ but I’m still not clear on the endgame for this language. Is the plan to kill both Rust and Go?

rgrmrts• 2 years ago

No, the plan is to build a simple general purpose language. Lots of folks already enjoy using Zig, and not every language has to be in direct competition with others.

kristoff_it• 2 years ago

We don't have VC money so the only endgame is to gift Zig to people who happen to find it an effective tool, so that they can make more software you can love.

AndyKelley2• 2 years ago

Endgame: After creating a language that encourages programmers to make robust and optimal software, using a toolchain that exemplifies these ideals by providing an order of magnitude faster development iteration speed, point this energy towards the ecosystem, with a focus on our core principle of prioritizing the needs of end users. Building upon this rich ecosystem of high quality software, create and maintain free, libre, and open-source applications that outcompete proprietary versions. I want to see the next Blender, the next Postgresql, the next Linux. This is my vision.

Mitchell's Ghostty project is a perfect example of this movement. At least, it will be when it is open sourced.

rc004• 2 years ago

I want to see the next Blender, the next Postgresql, the next Linux. This is my vision.

Do you think it makes sense to augment these existing (and successful) open source projects with Zig (language and/or toolchain)? Or should something grassroots and written primarily in Zig be their eventual successor?

zozbot2342• 2 years ago

... I want to see the next Blender, the next Postgresql, the next Linux. This is my vision.

That's a really nice thought. Maybe instead of "Move fast and break things" we can have "Move Zig for great justice."

skywhopper• 2 years ago

Why would it need to kill anything? It’s enough to be useful, imo.

ksec• 2 years ago

I don't remember Java ever had an endgame during the late 90s or early 00s. There were certainly a lot of ambitious. But on the whole we know or assumed about its ( JVM ) limitations.

There were also languages before or in between. But I dont record any one of them ever had an End Game plan. This phenomenon is entirely new and doesn't exist until certain language's supporter came out. And it has now somewhat popularised by it.

lenkite• 2 years ago

I think Zig is definitely an alternative for programmers who are too dumb to grok idiomatic Rust - sadly I am one of them. Go is more meant for middleware and services programming and is a simple, consistent language that won't go away as it has now been enterprise adopted.

zozbot2342• 2 years ago

I just asked my local AI chatbot, and they said that this is the endgame for Zig:

  Congratulation !!
  A.D.2111
  All bases of Rust were destroyed.
  It seems to be peaceful.
  But it is incorrect.
  Rust is still alive. Zig must fight against Rust again
  And down with them completely!
  Good luck.

mahmoudimus• 2 years ago

Thank you, Mitchell Hashimoto. I have always wondered why folks who made their fortunes of technology do not give back consistently. You are part of the few folks such as Jan Koum, Gabriel Weinberg and I'm sure there others who I have failed to mentioned. Thank you.

steveBK1236• 2 years ago

Yeah agreed. You basically see small time donations, or boomers once they have their $50B+ pile of money pledging to give it away at death. Not a lot of big incremental giving in between by $100M-$1B class.

I mean Gates is doing good work on poverty & global health for sure, but hes quite the exception.

You don't see the durable institutions like new universities being setup like after the gilded age. Not sure if its a tax code thing or what.

One thought I've had, living in NYC, is that there are just businesses structured to take every incremental dollar out of you whether you are worth $0/$100K/$100M/$100B now. $100M condos in 5 different cities, $1M supercars, private jets, blade chopper from Manhattan to the jet, just so many ways to part fools from their cash.

For context, David Rockefeller's old NYC townhouse, which he lived in for 70 years, was for sale, post-renovation, for $50M or so. Rockefeller name synonymous with old money wealth.

These days though, a $50M apartment might not even crack the top 10 sales annually in 2020s NYC. New money is also hot money by comparison.. I really do think our vintage of wealthy are that much more rapacious.

kibibu2• 2 years ago

In absolute value this is a fantastic contribution to support a very valuable project, and anybody who donates to Zig should be commended. It's one of a handful of projects that has a real chance of meaningfully pushing back against software bloat.

I do find it sobering to look at relative contribution, if for no other reason than to remind myself of the scales of money some are working with, and the out sized impact of having wealth. A $300k donation from a billionaire is loosely equivalent to somebody with $100k donating $30 (and likely has even less impact on quality of life!). We wouldn't have a hacker news article about such an event.

I should probably just shut up and go donate to Zig.

vineyardmike2• 2 years ago

You don't see the durable institutions like new universities being setup like after the gilded age. Not sure if it’s a tax code thing or what.

For a while, America was much more aware that you could just kill the rich like you killed kings. The rich gave away more and did more for society as a way of washing their reputation and proving they shouldn’t be killed in an uprising. Today, global society has become much more legally certain around perceptions of property rights and entitlement of the rich to their wealth.

If we saw genuine movements in America to (for example) tax wealth above 1B at like a 99% tax rate, I bet you’d suddenly see a few new well endowed universities and concert halls and similar.

Instead today, the wealthy are much more interested in showing off their reputation by buying media companies (WashPo, twitter, etc) with influence or by building their vision of the future in a commercial context - look at Elon musk and bezos going to space or Bryan Johnson trying to live forever and selling vitamins along the way.

When we do get billionaires donating, and they become unpopular, people try to penalize the institutions. Like the Zuckerberg general hospital getting petitioned to change their name.

Sphax• 2 years ago

That’s great to see, I’ve been using zig on and off for the past 3 years, I really like the language so I’m happy to see it gaining even more traction

hu3• 2 years ago

This is also good news for https://bun.sh which is written in Zig.

ww520• 2 years ago

This is great news. Zig is very promising. I got huge joy working with it. Good it got the recognition.

300k USD Donation Pledged by Mitchell Hashimoto

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