> For coding, you can use AI to write your code. For software engineering, you can't.
You can 100% use AI for software engineering. Just not by itself, you need to currently be quite engaged in the process to check it and redirect it.
But AI lowers the barrier to writing code and thus it brings people will less rigour to the field and they can do a lot of damage. But it isn't significantly different than programming languages made coding more accessible than assembly language - and I am sure that this also allowed more people to cause damage.
You can use any tools you want, but you have to be rigorous about it no matter the tool.
> For coding, you can use AI to write your code.
For software engineering, you can't.
This is a pretty common sentiment.
I think it equates using AI with vibe-coding, having AI write code without human review.
I'd suggest amending your rule to this:
> For coding, you can use AI.
For software engineering, you can't.
You can use AI in a process compatible with software engineering.
Prompt it carefully to generate a draft, then have a human review and rework it as needed before committing.
If the AI-written code is poorly architected or redundant, the human can use the same AI to refactor and shape it.
Now, you can say this negates the productivity gains.
It will necessarily negate some.
My point is that the result is comparable to human-written software (such as it is).
I absolutely don't care about how people generate code, but they are responsible for every single line they push for review or merge.
That's my policy in each of my clients and it works fine, if AI makes something simpler/faster, good for the author, but there's 0, none, excuses for pushing slop or code you haven't reviewed and tested yourself thoroughly.
If somebody thinks they can offset not just authoring or editing code, but also taking the responsibility for it and the impact it has on the whole codebase and the underlying business problem they should be jobless ASAP as they are de facto delegating the entirety of their job to a machine, they are not only providing 0 value, but negative value in fact.
Humans can and do make mistakes all the time. LLMs can automate most of the boring stuff, including unit tests with 100% coverage. They can cover edge cases you ask them to and they can even come up with edge cases you may not have thought about. This leaves you to do the review.
I think think the underlying problem people have is they don't trust themselves to review code written by others as much as they trust themselves to implement the code from scratch. Realistically, a very small subset of developers do actual "engineering" to the level of NASA / aerospace. Most of us just have inflated egos.
I see no problem modelling the problem, defining the components, interfaces, APIs, data structures, algorithms and letting the LLM fill in the implementation and the testing. Well designed interfaces are easy to test anyway and you can tell at a glance if it covered the important cases. It can make mistakes, but so would I. I may overlook something when reviewing, but the same thing often happens when people work together. Personally I'd rather do architecture and review at a significantly improved speed than gloat I handcrafted each loop and branch as if that somehow makes the result safer or faster (exceptions apply, ymmv).
I don’t think this is uncommon. At one point Lemmy was a project with thousands of stars and literally no working code until finally someone other than the owner adopted it and merged in a usable product.
Wow, and if you go to their website listed in they're profile, not only do almost none of the links work, the one that did just linked out to the generic template that it was straight copied from. Wow.
I'll one up you: at this point I'm becoming pretty sure that this is a person who actually hates LLMs, who is trying to poison the well by trying to give other people reasons to hate LLMs too.
Ah. I remember that guy. Joel. He sold his poker server and bragged around HN long time ago. He is too much of PR stunt guy recently. Unfortunately AI does not lead to people being nice in the end. The way people abuse other people using AI is crazy. Kudos to ocaml owners giving him a proper f-off but polite response.
I agree that's a funny coincidence. But, what about the change it wanted to commit? It is at least slightly interesting. It is doubly interesting that changing line 638 neither breaks nor fixes any test.
Even after the public call-outs you keep dropping blatant ads for your blog and AI in general in your PRs; there's no other word for them than ads. This is why I blocked you on the OCaml forum already.
When I was a kid, every year I'd get so obsessed about Christmas toys that the hype would fill my thoughts to the point I'd feel dizzy and throw up. I genuinely think you're going through the adult version of that: your guts might be ok but your mind is so filled with hype that you're losing self-awareness.
> As a bonus, we look forward to fewer violations (exhibit A, B, C) of our strict no LLM / no AI policy, which I believe are at least in part due to GitHub aggressively pushing the “file an issue with Copilot” feature in everyone’s face.
Also, the big part of that issue is people are incentivized to make their GitHub profile look good to have a higher chance of getting hired. Any non-mainstream platform is not as compelling to get social credits.
> Also, the big part of that issue is people are incentivized to make their GitHub profile look good to have a higher chance of getting hired.
Do people really get hired for bunch of PRs to random repos on GH or just think they will? My impression has always been that GH profile is completely ignored by both recruiters and interviewers.
And this kind of behaviour is a red flag for people who actually go digging through the GitHub profile. Like techical people in the last stages of a hiring process.
I've seen quite a few HR hiring processes where a mediocre HR person (knows to look for GH profile + activity on that, but not how to evaluate them) is paired with engineers with too little input power. In those processes, people that game their GH profiles tend to benefit.
Issues and Pull requests are only optional features . Open source projects could always use GitHub as just git host/mirror like how torvalds/linux is setup .
PRs are not optional: there is no way to disable them on GitHub. I can't be sure that this is intentional, but it certainly works out well for them that this is one of many properties which make it quite difficult to migrate away from the platform.
PRs aren't an optional feature, though acting on PRs is obviously optional; nothing prevents you from ignoring or (even automatically) closing all PRs from anyone who is not on a list of approved contributors.
Pull requests are not optional on GitHub. Users have been begging for more than a decade for an option to disable pull request for a repository, and GitHub continues to ignore them.
Not long back we were all urged to take CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md seriously. I've arrived at a place where the next thing I open source will include such a file which discusses not sending slop to the repository.
When the metrics becomes a target, ladida. GitHub profiles are utterly meaningless to me, speaking as someone that was hiring folks in 2023–4.
Perhaps we need an app to keep track of bad job candidates. We can gossip about them and such. I mean, we did that for an entire gender (sex?), let's go make a unicorn.
I don’t have strong opinions about Zig or Codeberg, but I find the self-described status of the latter’s infrastructure concerning[1]: they’re seemingly running faulty hardware in production with limited redundancy, and are actively soliciting more hardware of unknown quality/reliability/provenance from their community. This is cool for a hobbyist project, but it doesn’t scream “stable platform for a post-GitHub world,” which is how I’ve seen Codeberg (aspirationally) described.
Reading the infra part of the post made me smile, I spent part of my week putting workloads on spot but this is the real spot market. Chaos monkey is running in prod if you are ready for it or not.
Jokes aside, the technical depth it takes to make that one server run is impressive. That makes me more interested in codeberg, not less, though I’m going to keep my own mirror of the zig repo until they get some better hardware.
To be clear, I’m not knocking it; I also like to reuse old computers. But it’s incongruous with replacing GitHub, rather that being a “weirdo hobbyist” version of GitHub.
We always have the option of exiting Codeberg to a self-hosted Forgejo instance if that should become necessary for some reason. (Not that I expect it will, considering Codeberg is a non-profit.)
It seems like they have reliability issues; if I read their status page correctly, they have incidents every few minutes. Or how should one read their all green page?
They've abandoned GitHub for Codeberg because GitHub has ICE as a customer. Codeberg uses Paypal which is a member of the ICE "Virtual Global Taskforce".
There is a purity spiral that organizations can enter when they start doing this, which ends up with you shoving yourself into a cold dark corner of the internet and still not being completely detached from the badness because Cisco provides infrastructure for nearly every major weapons manufacturer and defense department globally.
> There is a purity spiral that organizations can enter when they start doing this
You are the one summoning that spiral by making a cheap gotcha wrt codeberg using Paypal.
The project apparently could and did move because the swith from github to codeberg wasn't that big of an impact, and because, while the new forge is not perfect, they feel the association is less severe. There is no "purity spiral" in that, just a pragmatic choice factoring in ethics.
Right, that seemed like a minor issue. There was also the minor issue of the increase of AI code PRs. Seems like the greater issue was a perception of deterioration of the platform (in their sites for years) and a reasonable path towards migration to another platform.
As I was reading your reply I was half convinced that it was not purity spiral but by the end, even you admit it’s an ethics thing so yeah it is pretty much purity spiral in place. Next they will leave the USA so that they won’t be associated with Trump.
I think there's a difference between providing services to X and a platform using a payment processor that collaborates with X.
You have a point, of course, but for many options, the best we can do is avoid the worst one as there's no perfect solution. I'm not saying that people should leave GitHub because of this, but I can see why some would and why they may pick a different, still not perfect, alternative instead of doing everything themselves.
There's nothing that compels you to "purity spiral" other than attempting to appease cynics who insist that all decisions must be completely binary and consistent, with no room for nuance or practicality, and that anything else is virtue signaling (which is somehow less defensible than enabling harm in the first place).
Reducing harm where feasible is still meaningful, and certainly better than no attempt at all.
I feel like that's the whole point of the OP. I agree with the overall post but mentioning the ICE relationship seems to detract from the main point.
"I hate GitHub because X Y and Z features are bad" is a good reason to move away; "I hate GitHub because one of their thousands of enterprise customers does not align with my political views" is not, in my opinion.
It seems like every organization in America is compromised in some way if you dig deep enough. Certainly you can find reasons for every big tech. There's still a balance to be struck though.
> It seems like every organization in America is compromised in some way if you dig deep enough.
I agree, and my view is that it goes much further. Quoting author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn:
"The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts.".
You're mad because they left a vendor because they switched to a different vendor that you think is just as bad but also you're accusing them of starting an "inevitable purity spiral?" Which one is it?
So much vague outrage over nothing. That CI system created by so called monkeys is the one of the best free CI service in the world. Not everyone has the millions of dollars like Zig Foundation to create their own CI servers.
After that they appreciate GitHub Sponsors, but say it is now a complete liability just because a project leader left. What are the actual changes? Any new rule? But no, it is now a "liability" and we should accept it.
Honestly speaking I like how big projects are exploring new hosting options. But there is no need to attack other platforms like this to promote your new host.
So you just chose to ignore the technical problems we have with GitHub Actions and then say there are no problems. That's certainly a take.
> That CI system created by so called monkeys is the one of the best free CI service in the world.
We self-host all our CI machines so the "free" hosted runners have no relevance here.
> Not everyone has the millions of dollars like Zig Foundation to create their own CI servers.
We don't have "millions of dollars". If only!
I'd also note that we spend our money very efficiently; most of our CI machines are consumer-grade hardware hosted in team member's homes. We don't just throw endless amounts of money at cloud providers.
> After that they appreciate GitHub Sponsors, but say it is now a complete liability just because a project leader left. What are the actual changes? Any new rule? But no, it is now a "liability" and we should accept it.
GitHub Sponsors is a liability because Microsoft can increase their cut at any time, or even axe it outright if they don't think it's profitable for them anymore. This risk is very real considering that, as Andrew pointed out, the feature has been neglected for years. It is objectively less risky for us to have donors use a platform like Every.org.
Anyone who has ever used Gitlab, or dare my foul mouth say Jenkins, has experienced a better system than Github actions.
Unless it's miraculously improved recently as it's been a couple years for me, they didn't even document their regex/pattern matching. Best I could find via searching was that it was whatever Ruby used, which wasn't any kind of real standard.
I don't want to call anyone names, but whoever defends said system deserves some ribbing.
I've used both and I don't know if they've been improved but both were terrible a few years ago (at least in our case). Very unstable and finicky. I last used Jenkins in 2017 and Gitlab in 2021, so I don't know how they are today.
The best free CI system in the world has macOS 15 runners running at 75% capacity due to a background process that consumes 100% CPU [1]. The problem is known to them since May but not fixed half a year later.
The only good thing about it is their very generous limits for "open source" projects (it doesn't even have to be free software AFAIK, just the source has to be visible to everyone).
The CI service itself is an absolute trash fire caused by the usual Microsoft NIH, and if they have financial means not to deal with it anymore, I see no reason for them to waste their limited development time on dealing with it.
Where else would the CI service for a Microsoft product be invented? NIH is a weird insult in this context. If Microsoft had instead acquired a CI service you’d be complaining about how they’re reducing competition.
I'm pretty sure the Zig Foundation does not have millions of dollars, contrary to Microsoft which has a market capitalization in the trillions, but consistently produces flaming garbage, product after product.
the technical issues are completely valid. at the same time, there is a balance between citing reasons for the change and burning bridges with those you leave behind.
the friction caused for the supporters felt a bit tone deaf. although the project itself runs on strong principles so i can imagine they know what they signed up for.
Unsure if this post is being astroturfed or not, but seeing HackerNews root for Microsoft and boo communities that embrace alternatives feels very, anti-hacker in mentality.
I don’t think people are questioning the move away from a gigacorp owned platform, but it’s the approach, the alternative chosen, and the brash language that are being questioned
There was a short time period between when Balmer left and the beginning of Windows desktop enshittification with ads and the (frankly insufferable) AI hype where Microsoft appeared to be on the right path. A saner Microsoft acquiring Github could have actually turned out to be a good thing, but alas...
> Putting aside GitHub’s relationship with ICE, it’s abundantly clear that the talented folks who used to work on the product have moved on to bigger and better things, with the remaining losers eager to inflict some kind of bloated, buggy JavaScript framework on us in the name of progress.
This says more about the author than anything else.
That they don't support a nationalistic paramilitary organization that requires its members to be masked and never known by the public so they cant be held accountable? A nationalized KKK is not something to ever support.
I don't care about ICE one way or another, but calling people "monkeys" and "losers" because they're not building a product to your exact specifications is extremely childish.
It seems to me that the real "losers" are the ones spending so much time bitching and moaning about a software platform they don't like.
> Thank you to the Forgejo contributors who helped us with our issues switching to the platform, as well as the Codeberg folks who worked with us on the migration - in particular Earl Warren, Otto, Gusted, and Mathieu Fenniak.
To me this said more than anything else in the post. The fact that there are genuine people at forgejo/codeburg that give a thought about what they are working on is pure gold.
I'm happy to see the move. Codeberg is probably a more stable/long-term solution than SourceHut as the founder is slightly unhinged (but love what he has built). Honestly, either would have been great choices.
More opensource projects should move off GitHub. I moved off it myself.
They all seem to do roughly the same things, but with a different web UI. Competition is great! Especially in response to a big corp that has market share. But... there was value in the centralization of GH.
I’m pretty sure Drew has stepped away from SourceHut. It’s kind of a bummer SourceHut stuck so stubbornly to mailing list only workflows. Everything else about the platform is great.
I believe Drew was taking a "break" from it, but not stepping away in any permanent sense. It's probably better for him to stay involved. I'd like to see him push his idea further. It's great to have options.
I agree that there is a steep learning curve compared to Github pull requests or Gitlab merge requests, but like many things the steep learning curve actually hides a very powerful tool. A famous example is the Linux Kernel, a project of such a size that simply can not work with the Github/Gitlab model.
Biggest problem of SourceHut that should be solved first before mass migration of open source - lack of the organizations that would allow multiple contributors working on the project, especially the project with multiple repositories.
PSA: Codeberg currently does not implement accessible account registration. It is impossible for screen reader users to make a Codeberg account due to the image-only captcha. There's a manual fallback path, but no idea how long that takes. I've been forced to use the Wikimedia one, and that was about 3 months. This has been pointed out to them many times, and it's seemingly not something they're willing to fix.
If you didn't know what Codeberg's political stance really is and how they treat the inconvenient part of their userbase... I guess now you know.
> This has been pointed out to them many times, and it's seemingly not something they're willing to fix.
On the exact page you're on is a link to an issue [0] acknowledging that the CAPTCHA is inaccessible and expressing that they plan to drop it (albeit with no concrete time-frame). I don't at all understand your argument that Codeberg must be slow at replying to emails (the "manual fallback path") because Wikimedia are; these are two completely unrelated entities and I don't see why you would make inferences about one from the other.
It greatly saddens me to see how little concern there is for accessibility for dev tooling. It says something about our industry that accessibility is often viewed as a “luxury” feature that can be dealt with once you’ve reached some level of success or revenue or whatever.
I’m hopeful AI tools can improve qol for those who require screen readers and similar tools but have a sinking feeling that it will only transfer even more of the burden for accessible access from operator to user.
> It greatly saddens me to see how little concern there is for accessibility for dev tooling.
This really depends on company size, and the company in question.
Everything Microsoft does in this space is excellent, VS Code almost feels like an app specifically designed for the blind at times. Other large companies aren't as good, but their products are usually somewhat usable.
Startups are a mixed bag, Zed is notoriously and completely inaccessible for example. Most SaaS tools wouldn't pass an audit but can be used with significant annoyances.
Open Source is usually pretty bad. GTK still doesn't do any accessibility on non-Linux platforms. QT used to be completely inaccessible, although they've significantly improved in the last couple years. Linux in general has major issues that makes it almost unusable unless you understand it at a very deep level, and maybe not even then.
Accessibility isn't a sexy thing to do, so unless you're practicing manager-driven development, nobody wants to work on it.
How is it not? In the not so distant past of the 1930s there were political parties advocating for the mass killing of people with disabilities, or at least the sterilization of those with heritable disabilities. There have been real campaigns in that period that did this type of forced sterilization, especially in some mental hospitals. You'll still find people espousing such beliefs, thankfully at the fringes for now.
Accessibility is the opposite position of that - but it's by no means a universally accepted good, unfortunately, especially when it requires extra effort to implement.
They could also just be people with bills to pay who are maybe faced with—by some accounts—a very challenging employment market. Or maybe due to disabilities they find the process of finding new work difficult or impossible.
Github is migrating from their old infra to Azure. Doing migrations like that is hard, no matter who you are. And from a business and engineering perspective I think it makes sense to leverage the economies of scale of Azure instead of GitHub running their own boxes.
The absolute state of Github is that I use it dozens of times a day and it works flawlessly, for free, with intermittent outages.
Microsoft is doing more with Github than I can say for most of their products. I won't go to bat for the Xbox or Windows teams, but Github is... fine. Almost offensively usable.
> they are dispirited clock-punchers who don't care about their craft.
Interestingly that is synonymous with losers according the definition of it in gervais principle. Which weirdly makes being called a loser less of an insult. (More like realist)
I’m sure this isn’t directed at everyone that works at GH, but it would have been more tactful to fault the people making decisions. Those frustrations are real though.
"I also strongly believe that you should not be proud of working for Microsoft, and particularly on GitHub for the last 5 years. I truly am sorry but you need to be called out."
A blanket ban on LLM-generated code is a completely reasonable position. If someone couldn't be bothered to write the code, why should anyone else bother to read it, let alone merge it?
Given my own experience working on compiler stuff with LLM, I'd say it's a very good decision.
LLMs jump at the first opportunity to use regex for EVERYTHING instead of doing proper lexing/parsing, for example. You need to repeatedly tell it not to use regex. In the end you might as well hand write your code, because you actually know how it works, unlike a clueless LLM.
No wonder they moved to Codeberg. Those kinds of projects tend to do the ol' move to Codeberg for whatever reason. If I had to put an analogy to it, Codeberg is like Kick and Github is like Twitch.
More seriously: I probably wouldn't have called every single current employee of GitHub a "loser", but more because I think truly cool people don't define themselves by where they happen to work at any given time. I'm sure the vast majority of people at GitHub are just tech employees trying to earn a living and don't particularly care whether the Zig guy thinks they're cool or not. What actually matters is that GitHub is a big centralized platform run by Microsoft for their own ends, and it's good to be free of it.
Holy shit, some people in the Zig community are toxic af. By extension, this means the community itself has issues it needs to face.
Not only have some of these folks - including the creator - been shitting in Rust threads, but here they're in here shitting on the awesome engineers at Github for no reason at all.
Good god.
edit: this is written by Andrew, the creator. The culture is rotten from the head.
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”.
I'm excited to see this migration happen, mostly because it signals to us (https://tangled.org) that large projects are willing to switch! We're working pretty hard to get Tangled out of alpha—we want it to be the place for free software communities.
Also recently wrote about our vision and commitment to indies and communities (and never enterprise!): https://anirudh.fi/future
Aside: Bluesky PDSes are configured to let you upload up to 100MB per blob. Perhaps it might be worth exploring as a medium for hosting release artifacts? Maybe the web interface can merge multiple blobs as fragments of large release files exceeding 100MB (or 15MB for PDSes using the out-of-box config which seems to be the case for Tangled’s instance)
You're running what aims to be a major programming language - have it where people expect and live with your gripes about the platform.
In retail you set up your store in the biggest mall with the most customers walking past - sure you can go set up in some back alley but don't expect customers to come to your store. This remains true even if the mall owns forget to mop the floor.
This feels immature and does not give confidence in the project/language leadership.
> You're running what aims to be a major programming language - have it where people expect and live with your gripes about the platform.
The core types who will make use of, contribute to, and/or otherwise use the repo likely don't need it to be on GitHub. Having it "where people expect" is useful for drive-by contributions but Zig doesn't really need that.
Furthermore, why should we as a larger community cede things to GitHub and Microsoft? It doesn't change unless larger parties move the needle.
None of this means that you have to be on a specific platform. GitHub as default/mandatory is a single point of failure for the entire tech industry.
For an example of another language that avoids being entirely coupled into Github, Go has it's real code hosting and CI interaction on a Gerrit instance, with some sync back and forth to GitHub for a few items.
The CI pain and operational blindness mentioned in the Zig post is entirely real.
It's just a public git repository and issue tracker, not a frigging "store front". People don't "discover" Zig because its source repository being hosted on Github vs some other random URL (and creating a bug report or PR appears to work exactly like on GH anyways: https://codeberg.org/ziglang/zig).
I think it's a broader cultural issue where everyone has to have strong opinions about everything and make a strong stand - instead of picking your battles
Not that I necessarily disagree with their reasoning, but stick to having strong feelings about your core "mission"? It just feels a bit "unstable". Hard to imagine such stuff coming from Java or Python or whatever other major language
It's a programming language, not a tool for end users. The intersection of people for who Zig being hosted on github is helpful with the people who are going to interact with the code source is basically none
Who are people? People in USA? Where I live it's frankly a positive if you're on a different base than github. SQLite seems to manage fine without github, so I'm not sure why you think Zig isn't going to be. That being said I don't necessarily disagree with your position on maturity, SQLite has an official github mirror after all. Even if you don't want to bother with that there are a lot of ways to write about it without calling people monkeys.
SQLite doesn’t really accept PRs[0], so I don’t think is comparable here. The SQLite model is great for their purposes but I doubt it’s suited to a community-based open contribution setup.
For established projects of a certain level of audience and attention, they can be hosted anywhere and it won't matter all that much. Zig is already such a project. People already know about Zig. There's tons of established projects that don't use GitHub (some migrated, some never used it) and they're fine.
Eh. Their messaging is immature here, but you don't need to be on the biggest thing - especially when you have a limited set of contributiors, not millions.
It is deeply unfortunate that Git won instead of Mercurial and even more unfortunate that GitHub won. GitHub's code review/PR UI is an abomination. We had better tools 15 years ago and GitHub is still a regression. There are tons of reasons to move off it if you're willing to pay the cost of working with alternatives.
I agree. I usually nope out of projects not on GitHub until someone builds an alternative that seems solid. I am surprised none of the major Linux distros have built one yet. I could see it being better funded if a few major Linux distros decided to host their own. Ubuntu had theirs but it uses a custom source control system so its niche to Ubuntu itself.
Some of the best news I have read all week. We do not need to bend the knee to US megacorporations & proprietary code forges for open source. I hope this causes bigger discussions—especially including locking chat to platforms like Discord along the same lines.
Apart from his skills and Zig work, this guy sounds like an angry teen or Linus wannabe .His tone makes Zig look like a one egoistic man show even it is not.
This was the very first thing I noticed when we (the Zig team) started seriously trialing Codeberg. Honestly, the transition was worth it just for the ability to navigate the website without a 3-5 second wait every time I click a link.
GitHub seems to be the worst of both worlds - partially rendered on the server, but then the frontend inexplicably pulls in additional data like... commit messages??
It's a double hit of latency, and for bonus points, the commit messages won't load at all if your browser is slightly out of date
I like Zig for the most part but this post does seem needlessly mean spirited. I don't like Microsoft or GitHub either, but I don't see the point of taking pot shots at the devs who work there.
And I this case it is a little surprising. Andrew is generally a pretty nice dude, has gone out of his way to try and make a fairly welcoming community. The Zig foundation also has Loris, who normally handles PR stuff, so he could have written this instead of Andrew.
Finally, that's such a bullshit stereotype. Plenty of people in the software world are perfectly friendly and articulate.
The arguments seem... really weak ? They just linked to some random obscure bug and an obscure OS not being supported in containers (and I'd imagine solution being "just bring your own runner").
Believe it or not, there are platforms outside of the big 3.
The GitHub Actions runner does not work on FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, and illumos, all of which are operating systems we either have existing support for, or intend to start supporting properly soon. (We already have FreeBSD CI; machines for the other 3 are arriving at my place tomorrow as it happens.)
And that's ignoring CPU architectures; the upstream GitHub Actions runner only supports x86 and aarch64. We had to maintain a fork that adds support for all the other architectures we care about such as riscv, loongarch, s390x, etc. We will also likely be adding mips64 and powerpc64 to the mix in the future.
Even IBM have to maintain an s390x fork because Microsoft can't even be bothered to accept PRs that add more platforms: https://github.com/uweigand/runner
> We already have FreeBSD CI; machines for the other 3 are arriving at my place tomorrow as it happens.
That's great.
I hope it works out, and you have CI for NetBSD, OpenBSD, and illumos, too.
Go's support for NetBSD has been a big boon to the more casual NetBSD user who isn't going to maintain a port.
It means a random Go open-source project you use probably works on NetBSD already, or if it doesn't, it can be fixed upstream.
Maybe Zig could play a similar role.
It's a shame GitHub doesn't have native CI even for FreeBSD on x86-64.
I can see the economic case against it, of course.
That said, the third-party Cross-Platform GitHub Action (https://github.com/cross-platform-actions/action) has made Free/Net/OpenBSD CI practical for me.
I have used it in many projects.
The developer is currently working on OmniOS support in https://github.com/cross-platform-actions/omnios-builder.
A bug that they have encountered, have reported, with a description of the root cause, and has not been fixed. A bug that has wasted their time and money.
Do the arguments have to be strong? I do not think they need to provide any justification. If the core developers decided that they would be more happy (or less miserable) with a different service, then let them.
"We don't like being hosted under microsoft due their business practices" is perfectly fine argument, no need to nitpick bugs out of bugtracker for justification
I mean, if they've been regularly hitting said bug, does it matter how obscure it is? If I were using a tool that was broken for me personally, I'd be ditching it, too; with absolutely zero regard to whether the tool works for others.
It is good to have alternatives to mega-corporations controlling the ecosystem.
Microsoft controlling GitHub is an issue, but one can see this issue emerging in different places too; see shopify puting pressure on the ruby ecosystem, ending with various developers who contributed to ruby (in particular via gems and bundler) no longer being accepted there (via RubyCentral's take-over, under shopify's directive and influence onto ruby). Many more examples can be given here. The thing is that money buys influence, ultimately dictating who can contribute and how. Python forcing mandatory 2FA onto all developers is also an example here - the hobbyist who just contributes code, has not really any benefit here, whereas corporations delegate more "security" onto unpaid folks.
Exhibit A is a github user joelreymont who seems to be making a habit of this behavior. He did a very similar spam on ocaml github.com/ocaml/ocaml/pull/14369
Reminds me of Blindsight by Peter Watts. Aliens viewed our radio signals as a type of malware aimed to consume the resources of a recipient for zero payoff and reduced fitness. This is the same.
This is absolutely insane. If you look at joelreymonts recent activity on GitHub, there is what I would consider an bomb of AI slop PRs with thousands and thousands of changes, AI generated summaries/notes, copyright issues, you name it.
People like this are ruining open source for the rest of us, and those poor maintainers really have their work cut out for them sorting through this slop.
What are you going to do? You can't expect some sort of self-censorship based on righteousness and morals. I see joelreymonts as a pioneer planting chestertons fences. LET THE MAN COOK!
I don't particularly like Zig, actually I don't like the language.
But I have to admit, it's a bold move, free software projects should be encouraged to do the same.
I don't necessarily disagree with these points (especially with Actions being an unstable POS) but it's not very encouraging to see such language from the lead of Zig. I would reconsider future donations to the Zig Foundation if I were donating.
I wish GH had issues only every 2 years. That’d be amazing! We see issues weekly - if not near daily - at work. Personally I advocate for self-hosted GitLab. I like their pipelines a lot more than GH Actions too.
What are "P80s"? Given the context, I doubt this refers either to screens used in mineral processing or to home-built firearms, which are all that I see in the first couple pages of search results.
This is a very good move, using more open technology benefits everyone in the long run.
Aside from the bitter words against Github (and I read comments here forgetting about the very real consequences with people lives like collaboration with ICE), using codeberg is using Forgejo : those technology are by us and for us. Unlike Github we can run our own if necessary and all the technology (actions and such) can be improved and be shared between us.
An other benefit of Forgejo/Codeberg is the absence of pushing for paying more, Github is not free and lives of users going to Azure/Gemini or other Mircrosoft services. There are many parts that are made/changed to nudge people into paying more and more and be vendor-locked.
I like my life to have the fewest dark patterns as possible and Coderberg is extremely helpful.
For a while now I've been dual hosting my projects on both Github and Codeberg and adding a note in the README's [1] explaining the situation. I donate to Codeberg and run my own self-hosted forgejo runners for actions, and maintain much of my testing on both platforms.
I push to Github and then an Action mirrors the code to Codeberg automatically.
I'd fully switch over except practically everybody is on Github and nobody is on Codeberg, and I've had more outages with Codeberg than Github over the past year.
It really feels like there could be some good tooling in this area to make working through multiple Forge's easier and not force things to be centralized so much. Hopefully more projects moving out of Github makes it easier and gets more people contributing elsewhere.
What do you find lacking in tooling in that regard?
I don't think there is all that much friction in distributing git, it's one of the easiest tools to have multiple remotes on. The auxiliary tooling is all open source too, so not much in the way of hosting your own, or for hosted platforms offering the services.
The social aspect of the hosted platforms is unlikely to ever be distributed because that is basically githubs only differentiation.
To see this just as a hosting switch misses the bigger picture. This is the logical infrastructure conclusion of Zig's 'Zero Dependency' philosophy.
Zig spent years removing dependencies on the system C compiler (zig cc), removing dependencies on libc, and is currently working to remove the dependency on LLVM (the self-hosted backend).
GitHub was just another dependency.
For a project obsessed with reproducibility and toolchain sovereignty, relying on a single proprietary platform (and its changing ToS/AI policies) was a massive architectural liability. They aren't just moving repos; they are eliminating 'Platform Risk' the same way they eliminated 'Linker Risk'.
I haven't really taken a step back to critically think about using GitHub as a platform until now, but I do agree with the points in this article.
While I like the idea of a more distributed repository environment, I will miss the project discoverability, social aspects, and centralization that GitHub offers. It'll probably be awhile before I make a switch, but I will eventually.
Most of my commits for the past five or so years are not on GitHub (both in professional and personal contexts), but that does not equal to me not having a GitHub account and occasionally using it to raise issues / submit PRs to someone else's project that happens to be on GitHub.
In an industry full of people for whom there's little to no expectation that their work will do much more than fluff up a trust fund somewhere and pay their bills, it's refreshing to see someone who both has principles and is willing to act on them.
I'm not reading this whole thread, but based on the title I figured it kind of boiled down to name calling bullshit by more open source maintainers.
Folks, we have to stop this bullshit. NOBODY is perfect. Not you. Not me. Not anyone. It IS entirely possible that some script thing was written by an intern and it doesn't quite work right. That's possible. Does that make them a shitty intern?
As I've told others, and try to tell others, empathy is super important in the tech field. As a fellow autistic person who used to be this way towards other people, I find it equally as jarring now and completely turns me off to listening to whatever that person has to say when they make posts like this.
Give people some grace, make fixes, move on with your life. That's the beauty of OSS development. Submit some patches, reach out to maintainers, open a dialog, have good conversation. Don't just shit all over someone for the sake of doing so even if they are doing something "stupid".
> Unfortunately, when it sold out to Microsoft, the clock started ticking. “Please just give me 5 years before everything goes to shit,” I thought to myself. And here we are, 7 years later, living on borrowed time.
Man, sometimes I feel like I live on a different planet. I have been using GitHub since 2010 and—while I really wish I had a nicer way of putting this—I cannot remember a time when all of the flagship products were not uniformly either worst-in-class or close to it. Code review/PRs, issues, code search, CI, a real enterprise offering, and now AI features: all of these offerings had gaps serious enough to instigate real, threatening upstarts, and some of those upstarts were themselves big enough to become public companies. Seriously. A viable path to IPO from 2013 to (say) 2019 was literally "make a version of a GitHub feature that simply does not suck."
I loved GitHub in 2010. I also remember those years, 2013 to 2019, being essentially totally lost, with no meaningful product movement at all. Am I truly alone in this? What is this Andrew talking about here?
I'm not going to defend the Microsoft acquisition, but at least—excruciatingly slowly—things like code review and issues are finally starting to receive features. It's crazy to say it out loud but that is what I see.
I just can't help but think the product "enshittification" narrative here is an ex post justification of the author's own feelings.
No idea if this is a big thing or not, but people don't like AI. Other than leaders who have been sold a promise, and the people charging for that promise.
Well, GitHub is under AI org now internally at MSFT; on the github front page, they mostly advertise Copilot; I think the ability to host, run and fund code is accidental.
Heh, I tried to follow the link to the Codeberg repo at the top of the blog post and it is failing to connect. Maybe HN hug of death? In any case it makes the rest of the post and its criticisms of GitHub hit a little differently.
edit: I say as a GitHub sponsor of Zig for the past few years. I do see that I'll have to move that, and maybe I will, but I don't love having yet another account with saved credit card info and subscription to manage...
I do feel that GitHub's product development has been less exciting in recent years, but that's natural for any maturing platform. While I can't judge whether there are fewer talented people involved, I've noticed they haven't increased mistakes, and the platform continues to grow. It would be unfair to overlook the hard work that goes into maintaining GitHub and shipping new features (even if some of those features aren't to everyone's taste). I'm grateful for GitHub and hope it continues to thrive. Peace.
This is hilarious. Hating Microsoft will never go out of style. Fun to see the youngs rediscover it. Also hilarious is that Codeberg as a frontend is slow as hell; slower than Github even.
If voiced and channeled properly, I see very little chance of Microsoft and Github wouldn't prioritize fixes for a critical open source project.
Yes issues have been filed but more could be done back channel.
Personally - I think GitHub is a cultural artifact now. Of the entire planet. Hackers and curious minds from Japan to Alaska and everything in-between flock to GitHub.
As I pointed out in a different comment, even IBM have to maintain a GitHub Actions runner fork with s390x support because upstream just cannot even be bothered to accept the relevant patches: https://github.com/uweigand/runner
If IBM cannot get Microsoft to work with them on something so small but impactful, there's no chance we can.
> Personally - I think GitHub is a cultural artifact now. Of the entire planet. Hackers and curious minds from Japan to Alaska and everything in-between flock to GitHub.
And it's in the hands of a for-profit company pushing LLM nonsense. That should be alarming! Let's instead encourage people to use platforms managed by non-profits.
I don't see this site as being the spiritual successor to /. at all, the audience is much more money focused and much less software focused. I miss /. as a low 5 digit user there.
I certainly think that this site has significant overlap with /., though of course not 100% the same. It feels crazy similar to me in fact, like stepping back in time to when I used to post there.
I am not sure it is like sourceforge. The UI of sourceforge was always bad. Github's UI is quite solid. I actually started to hate gitlab recently because of their UI. I always feel in utter confusion when it comes to gitlab.
>Let us please consider the GitHub issues that remain open as metaphorically “copy-on-write”. Please leave all your existing GitHub issues and pull requests alone. No need to move your stuff over to Codeberg unless you need to make edits, additional comments, or rebase. We’re still going to look at the already open pull requests and issues; don’t worry.
No way for those to be moved too or not worth the effort? Unless misremembering, another project that moved forges (to GitLab?) had somehow done it.
GitHub's API has extremely aggressive rate limits which make migrating large numbers of existing issues and PRs off of the platform borderline impossible. AIUI, this is why Gitea's main repo is on GitHub: they couldn't figure out a way to cleanly migrate! The tinfoil hat in me absolutely sees this as an attempt at vendor lock-in on GitHub's end.
I'm not sure I'd want something I cared about to depend on a codebase that included anything as amateurish as that "safe_sleep" script mentioned in the post. It's honestly astonishing that it took GitHub as long is it did to fix that bug.
Forgejo Actions is what Zig has migrated to. It's very similar to GitHub Actions; the downside of that is that you inherit questionable design choices, but the big upside is that migration is super easy. While they don't target 1:1 compatibility, things are similar enough that you basically only need to tweak workflow files very slightly. Our experience so far is that it fixes most of our serious problems with GitHub Actions; in particular, their runner software is significantly easier to deploy and configure, has much better target support (GitHub's runner is essentially impossible to use outside of x86_64/aarch64 linux/windows/macos; we tried to patch it to support riscv64-linux and got stuck on some nonsensical problems on GitHub's side!), and actually accepts contributions & responds to issues. My issues with the GitHub Actions' backend & web interface (of which I have many) are pretty much all gone, too, with no new issues taking their place.
I don't like Azure DevOps or it's pipelines (the yaml ones, not the classic drag and drop that is now disabled by default), but I like it a lot more than github actions. I doubt we'd ever really use github actions for security reasons, but I do prefer the explicit behaviors and templating with structure with azure compared to how Github Actions tries to solve change management with digitalisation. I can totally see why github actions would make more sense if you don't have enterprise organisation type AD/Entra + Azure though.
I for one am thankful for GitHub Actions, having free access to stateless automation and deployment scripts that's versioned along with code, running on Servers I don't have to manage has been a gift.
I don't miss anything from the dark days of managing self-hosted CI servers.
What's the main diff between the different repos? I would think whoever keeps the repo free of malicious code is the best. A big player like GH should have an advantage on that. Also not intentional malicious code uploads, but vulnerable code should be detected and reported to tyhe submitters.
Wow. I think that's a serious mistake. Maybe GitHub is no longer so great and snappy but nowhere to justify moving something that needs: 1. Money, 2. Exposition, to something obscure just because it's a bit better. It's Git with an UI anyway, there isn't such large difference. I don't care about the fact the post is harsh: it's the content that it is broken from my POV because. It is absolutely legit to do something like that, in theory, but when you are handling a project that - at this point - is also the chosen language of a non trivial amount of folks, you need to act not just following what you like, but what is better for the project in the long time, and it is very hard to see how going away from GitHub (the fucking big market of open source software in the main city plaza -- let's use the same post tones) is better for Zig. What I think it is better is, of course, not absolutely better, but let's zoom on this issue root cause. It is the classical developer intolerance for tool that are not "as they wish/think", which is very common among technical people, but is a POV, I mean this "tool oriented" workflow, where this little feature/customization matters so much in your life (instead of adapting a bit and do not care), that I believe is a problem in our industry, and also has effects on the design philosophy of many programmers, that are too details oriented. Coders spend the majority of their life in the terminal, not on in GitHub. To check issues / PR there is not this Stranger Things Upside Down nightmare.
Another problem with that is that you know what you are leaving, but you don't really know what you find in the new place. GitHub used to go down often in the early days. Now they may not be snappy and unfortunately like 99% of the web felt for this Javascript framework craziness. But the site is always up, I bet has disaster recovery and serious backup policy, and so forth. Can you find this so obviously in other smaller places?
GitHub Actions are seriously broken and that alone is a technically sound enough reason to move: the sleep.sh bullshit has degraded the performance of our CI for a long time, as it regularly livelocks in an endless while(true) spin runner agents, who stop processing new jobs. The agent itself has poor platform support also because it has a runtime dependency on .NET, and lately GH Actions started running jobs out of order with the result that old jobs would starve and time out, causing PRs to turn up red for no real reason.
It's a real problem to run a project like Zig if your CI doesn't work. I guess we could have paid for an external CI service, but that as well would depend on GitHub APIs, so we would have gained what, a couple years? Given the current trajectory of GitHub I wouldn't trust them to maintain those APIs correctly for any longer than that (and as far as I know the current vibe-scheduling issues might already be reflected in the APIs that third party CI providers would use).
Let's not forget that "GitHub is an AI company now".
As a side note, people said that not posting anymore on Twitter and leaving Reddit was also a death sentence for Zig. Time has passed and we're still alive so far, while in the meantime both platforms have started their final journey towards the promised lands of the elves.
They won't get there tomorrow or the next month, but I'm sure there has been a time where people started moving from Sourceforge to GitHub and somebody else remarked that they were doing something needlessly risky.
As far as we can tell Codeberg is a serious attempt at a non-profit code sharing platform and we feel optimistic enough about its future that we're willing to bet on it.
I had to scroll too far for someone to mention third-party CI. GitHub Actions free runners have always sucked, but the third-party runner ecosystem is really strong for those who can afford it. imo the APIs are far better than the rest of the product - I suspect enterprise customers are strong-arming GitHub to keep them reliable. and there's always third-party CI like tekton if Actions' yaml is too annoying
As the creator of one of the larger Zig projects, does this announcement undermine your confidence in Zig at all? Either with the language used or the decision in itself?
I was happy from the sideline seeing the recent big Zig donations. But this sudden decision is a shock. Technical issues can be worked around (I wish/think), but leaving such a dominant platform? I don't know. For my small small needs Forgejo works great, but for Zig, a project which I hope has a lot of mainstream success, I'm not convinced, that Forgejo/Codeberg is the best fit (atm). Even Graphene OS which has very high standards is (still) on Github, maybe Zig could brood (brüten) a bit longer to decide if it is really time to leave?
I'm very happy with this and hope it's part of a larger trend to move software away from Big Co. I'll have to move my projects off GitHub too, so I'm not a hypocrite :)
I sent a pull request to an open source project and GitHub added Copilot to review it, saying I invited it to review, embarrassing me. It then spit out some nonsense. Turns out this is controlled by a switch somewhere, which was enabled.
Its sad to see people silently supporting Github monopoly.
Any migration out of github should be encouraged.
Decentalized, open-source systems should always be preferred
over corporate walled gardens. Trusting Microsoft never ends well.
The amount of infrastructure/projects/etc that stop with github malfunctions and have
no fallback or operating mirror git is astounding.
Github is eventually going to be enshittified and abandoned, so its fairly wise to
spread projects into multiple(not just codeberg) synced mirrors
where any server failing doesn't stop progress.
Another software project feels it’s necessary to dive into divisive politics when it should just make good software. It’s sad, really. Now what I think of when I hear „Zig“ is a community of self-important, immature and delusional people instead of thinking about the undeniable advantages of the Zig language.
You own the code, you decide where you want to host it. If anyone knows, I'm looking for copyrighted code to deploy my own cloned service to make some money, DM.
I think it would make more sense in a pure AI-topic, but the fact that you can scrape copyrighted content and create services (AI companies) is the original idea behind my comment. I'm not sure to what extent CoPilot was trained on private repositories or other possibly copyrighted code. But if it was e.g, I'm supporting their (Zig's) cause.
This is extremely misleading. "Membership" is about direct contribution to and influence over the non-profit; it'd be somewhat analagous to being a GitHub shareholder. The very first question on Codeberg's FAQ [0] makes this abundantly clear, as does the "Join" page [1]. I don't see any part of the website you could go to to get any other impression.
Good, rejecting reliance on Microsoft's centralized platform means less vulnerability to their evil policy/practices (AI, users/country bans, privacy, vendor-locking)
> Thank you to the Forgejo contributors who helped us with our issues switching to the platform, as well as the Codeberg folks who worked with us on the migration
I'd love to see a writeup about these problems/solutions at some point.
i was drunk and at a bar.. zig and nim got up to do karaoke together..
elm was there...
anyway, they started singing..
'weeee are the champions, my friends..'
it was fun. i got up.
'no time for looooosers, cos we are the champions..'
so fun.
we had these awesome, delicious cocktails.. they had strawberry in them (with 3 r's) and guido made a toast. he said he couldn't sing but wrote down my name for a song. 'abracadabra'.
heh, i want to reach out and grab ya! i nailed it, then did another queen song.
eventually we went out back and smoked a joint, but we were so drunk, it knocked us out.
Very good move, codeberg is noscript/basic (x)html friendly, which microsoft github is no more. Unfortunately, zig is in bad shape since microsoft rust is pushed hard everywhere in spite of zig.
I thought the same but from another perspective, it's better to explain things in a language you dominate and let others translate it to theirs, which might be a good or bad translation; than translate it yourself to a language you don't dominate and the others always get a bad translation. At least in the first case new people can come with better translations.
This is all assuming translation tools always translate things wrong, which they do when it comes to programming terms.
One doesn't exclude the other. You can use machine translation and clearly marking it as such, and then let people override them if there is the necessary contribution activity.
Well, integrations are also important. Currently everything works first with Github (Codex, Claude Code, Linear, etc. etc.) so it's just easier. There's also Gitlab for people who don't like Github. Personally for what I do, Github does its job well, and the free private repos are great.
> it’s abundantly clear that the talented folks who used to work on the product have moved on to bigger and better things, with the remaining losers eager to inflict some kind of bloated, buggy JavaScript framework on us in the name of progress.
> More importantly, Actions is created by monkeys
This writing really does not reflect well on Zig. If you have technical issues with Github, fine: cite them. But leave ad hominems like "losers" and "monkeys" out of it.
Codes of conduct are perfunctory virtue signalling. Do we really need a unique set of "rules" posted on every project? They all sound like they were written by the same AI bot. That said, it's telling that the Zig leader can't even follow them. The rules should just be taken down.
There is a difference between what you say to and about volunteers working for free on their hobby and what you say about the work of a company famously known as "The Death Star"
You want to work with people and the group says "yay and this is how we will work together" you do that or go away. This is entirely separate to stating a universal truth such as "Microsoft product blows because they do not care", "Oracle sucks" or famously "You can't anthropomorphise Larry Ellison"
Did Linus ever blow-torch community volunteers or did he get the pip purely with big corp submitting paid trash for their own purposes? He seems to cop a fair bit himself from people saying thou shalt not...
The standards differ. Microsoft is going to be ok guys.
Not sure it does. Right there in the same link you posted:
This document contains the rules that govern these spaces only:
The ziglang organization on Codeberg
#zig IRC channel on Libera.chat
Zig project development Zulip chat
"The bug in this "safe sleep" script is obvious from looking at it: if the process is not scheduled for the one-second interval in which the loop would return (due to $SECONDS having the correct value), then it simply spins forever. That can easily happen on a CI machine under extreme load. When this happens, it's pretty bad: it completely breaks a runner until manual intervention. On Zig's CI runner machines, we observed multiple of these processes which had been running for hundreds of hours, silently taking down two runner services for weeks."
"I don't understand how we got here. Even ignoring the pretty clear bug, what makes this Bash script "safer" than calling into the POSIX standard sleep utility? It doesn't seem to solve any problem; meanwhile, it's less portable and needlessly eats CPU time by busy-waiting."
"The sloppy coding which is evident here, as well as the inaction on core Actions bugs (in line with the decay in quality of almost every part of GitHub's product), is forcing the Zig project to strongly consider moving away from GitHub Actions entirely. With this bug, and many others (severe workflow scheduling issues resulting in dozens of timeouts; logs randomly becoming inaccessible; random job cancellations without details; perpetually "pending" jobs), we can no longer trust that Actions can be used to implement reliable CI infrastructure. I personally would seriously encourage other projects, particularly any using self-hosted runners, to look carefully at the stability of Actions and ask themselves whether it is a solution worth sticking with long-term when compared with alternatives."
----
I agree that the writing in the blog post is more colorful than precise, but sanitizing every bit of expression dulls the internet. Humans invented language for a reason.
> I agree that the writing in the blog post is more colorful than precise, but sanitizing every bit of expression dulls the internet. Humans invented language for a reason.
Where do you draw the line, then? Is a racist screed acceptable to you as long as the following paragraph references technical issues correctly?
The language in the blog post is insulting. Imagine how you would feel if you were the person who wrote this code, and now you are being called a monkey in front of thousands of people on the internet. Certainly you've made mistakes in your code before...or are you saying you've always written flawless code without errors?
These codes of conduct always seemed a bit superfluous to me, but after reading comments like these I can totally see why they are necessary.
> But leave ad hominems like "losers" and "monkeys" out of it.
Ad hominem happens when someone undermines the argument based on the speaker's background. Here they are not undermining any argument. They're just name calling. This is name calling, not ad hominem.
I get frustrated with tech all the time! I get it. Grr when Actions feels so irritatingly misbehaved…
But how you handle or fail to handle your frustration demonstrates the competence of your character and speaks volumes of what you’d be like to work with.
It's okay to bring some "natural" language in technical communication. It feels more humane. All the whitewashed corporate language, riddled marketing bullshit feels so soul dead.
If he had gone on a rant purely about the product - eg “GitHub actions is a garbage product that never works”, I think that wouldn’t have left such a bad taste in my mouth. Calling the developers all “losers” crosses a line.
Sure. If you feel the need to write "this is shitty code", fair enough, I'm fine with making allowances for that kind of language. But please leave it at that, instead of also insulting the people who wrote it. There are, unfortunately, plenty of ways for bad incentives to result in competent people creating bad products.
As a corporate drone it's refreshing. Already planning to dedicate some of the holiday season to learning Zig and this latest move only makes it more enticing.
Well at least he's being a jerk on his own blog here, so it's easy to ignore. I've seen instances of him unreasonably lashing out without the decency of understanding others' writings first on third party properties. A quick search turned up https://discourse.llvm.org/t/rfc-libc-taking-a-dependency-on... can't remember the details of other instances.
I agree that he came out blasting, and the language and tone, particularly at the beginning are pretty off-putting. That being said, having read the full post, I can't say I disagree with the motives and point of view.
He probably read too many Linux kernel mailinglist posts recently.
But I agree on the Devon Zuegel praise. Most of the good devs and managers are gone. Only brian for the git SHA-256 migration is still there I think, though he got no time finishing it.
Seems like Andrew realize how insane it was name calling fellow software engineers and updated his post to not call Github engineers "monkeys" anymore. Still a shame he did it initially, and that he didn't apologize for it, but removing that is better than nothing.
As a former JavaScript developer and current JavaScript hobbyist I see why this article’s language is deeply offensive. Most employed JavaScript developers absolutely suck at what they do and are highly sensitive about it. Everything other than praise is offensive. The surest indication of maturity is abandoning politeness in favor of evidence, empathy, or stronger arguments.
On the other hand Zig is often regarded as the fastest executing modern programming language. They have earned the ability to complain about performance like no one else. The article cites precise issues they have with GitHub.
Furthermore JavaScript, when not written by monkeys, is extremely fast which further qualifies their complaint. For example I have a large SPA that loads in the browser from across a network in around 0.065 seconds and achieves full rendering and state restoration in about 0.135 seconds. If I drop the largest one feature from that SPA I can get full rendering and state restoration in about 0.08 seconds. Your typical JavaScript developer, on the other hand, struggles to copy/paste code into a JSX template someone else defined with no idea how to measure performance. To me that’s what’s offensive.
I much prefer the authors of anything on the internet be honest about what they think instead of self-censoring their language. I really thought we all agreed on disliking Newspeak ?
You're right, I've been hearing lots of good things about Zig and I wanted to check it out but I'm glad I saw this post. I want no part of this thing.
I've heard people call other people "monkeys" before in a work setting. it's never good. Fact is, you don't need to call anyone names or insult them.
The takeaway for me is that the Zig project is led by people who are extremely immature and toxic. I simply don't trust any decision these people make. If you can't bring yourself to respectfully disagree with other human beings, if you resort to calling names and insults targetted at developers because of bugs, then i don't trust you to not backdoor your own code, or do something harmful to those who rely on your work because of some drama, spat or activism.
Even if actual political activists did this it would be unacceptable. If you called Netanyahu a monkey because of his Gaza genocide, most people who are pro-palestine will try to cancel you! Not because they think highly of him, but because it hurts the cause more than it helps.
Andrew: It seems you don't respect your own self or your community enough to set an example of decorum and civility. You've made Zig a platform for your own personal shitposting. Please do better!
>If you called Netanyahu a monkey because of his Gaza genocide, most people who are pro-palestine will try to cancel you! Not because they think highly of him, but because it hurts the cause more than it helps.
Your reading of the current political climate is very different to mine.
GitHub was very snappy in the early days. I remember how refreshing I found GitHub when it was new. I don't know when but sometime after 2020 it has just been going downhill.
Yeah, calling the authors of this code losers and monkeys is being kind. There is zero excuse for ever writing code like this, the incompetence is staggering.
This writing made me curious enough to click the provided citation though, and I'd have to say "monkeys" is really being kind if we take into account the combination of code quality issues, lack of surrounding process, and _what_ these code quality issues are affecting (the criticalness of the path).
God this entire thread is just people defending him as “a breath of fresh air” and “just using human language”. There is something in people that makes them enjoy seeing others belittled like this. A complete lack of empathy, because no one would like to be treated this way themselves, but are perfectly happy seeing others treated this way. One commenter justifies it by saying “if I’m fucking up, it’s ok to speak to me this way”. Sure guy, we believe you.
This reminds me of when Linus Torvalds would lose his shit now and then and launch gratuitous personal attacks at people who had made mistakes. Comment sections would be filled with folks laughing at Linus’ latest victim. “Couldn’t be me, I would never make this mistake”. Even Linus admits he was wrong to treat people this way and he’s taken time off to work on himself and become a better person. But there is still no shortage of people who enjoy seeing pain inflicted on others, nor people larping as a younger Linus.
Many people are tired of the toxic positivity common in corporate speak, which lets poor performers off the hook, and prevents high-quality talent from speaking freely.
"A complete lack of empathy" is a bit of a stretch, no? Calling someone a monkey is fairly lighthearted, while getting the point across that maybe they should take stock of the awareness of their abilities.
> One commenter justifies it by saying “if I’m fucking up, it’s ok to speak to me this way”. Sure guy, we believe you.
Did you read the issue at hand?
This is not average people making "mistakes". This is severe incompetence at every layer of decision making, and a complete lack of care for quality work. If you want to be mad at someone for being unfair, be mad at the manager of these people for putting them in a position they are grossly unprepared for.
> no one would like to be treated this way themselves
I'd like to be treated this way if I am doing really stupid things. If I am doing the kind of stupid things GitHub is doing, I'd rather someone call me out as a monkey so that I know I f-ed up.
I know calling "monkey" is not professional but my expectation of professional treatment stops at my office with my colleagues and at a few other places. I don't expect the whole world to be professional to me. I can take some bloke on the internet calling me a monkey if that helps me to introspect and make things right.
If they're nice about it and choose professional words to tell me I'm being stupid, that's great. But if they cannot and they call me "monkey", I'll take that too. I'd rather have the feedback in whatever words they can muster than not have the feedback at all.
Eh I thought it was on point. The github CEO talking about adopt ai or get out uses no curse words or direct insults, but i found it far more threatening and distasteful.
Hackernews seems to consistently believe that you can be terrible as long as you're polite.
Oh no! Anyways... I love zig and I'm glad they're moving off what GitHub has become, not least because enough high profile projects leaving might make them focus on what matters again.
Agreed. Came here to point out that the lack of professionalism and common courtesy here is reminiscent of the dark entitled days of open source in the late 90s that had attitude of "We build free software so we can tell you to go fuck yourself.". Hope we're not headed back there.
As opposed to the modern era of megacorps benefitting from the free labor of OS maintainers? I will not deny that corporate contributions to open source projects are significant, but there are definitely some very visible examples of projects being taken advantage of by companies that want to use free software without giving back.
“We build free software so we can tell you to go fuck yourself.”
Sounds like a great thing compared to the sanitized corpo bullshit from nowadays. Microsoft bought themselves into OSS with github and each project has a bland CoC.
It’s pathetic. Even the github monkeys know deep down that this is wrong.
>A pity. Saw Zig as something rising but with this kind of toxicity, no thanks.
Don't get me wrong, it is a bit toxic. However, I feel like taking one comment in a larger article and blowing it up out of proportion is just as toxic.
The unfortunate truth is that this is where we are as a society. It doesn't reflect poorly on them. It reflects well. They're straightshooters. Theyre not afraid to speak candidly (your definition of candid may differ). They inject humor. You may not like it personally, but it doesn't reflects poorly even if it should.
Calling people monkeys and losers doesn't particularly tickle my sense of humor. If anything, it reminds me of Linus Torvalds from his toxic ages. Fortunately, he has matured well. Andrew seems like a smart guy, I hope that he will have the emotional maturity to realize that you can be no-bullshit and straight to the point without the need to call people names.
It doesn't reflect well, but also, is it not fairly par for the course from a BDFL type? Surely Linus Torvalds has said meaner things at some point on a listserv. Why does this guy get blasted for it? Because people still have generally positive sentiment towards Github? Just a day or 2 ago some other article was making similarly "ad hominem" attacks towards anonymous Youtube PMs, it got tons of upvotes and nobody clutched their pearls for the poor PMs. The Github/MS engineers who maintain actions (whose poor performance probably isn't even the result of any single individuals bad code), will be fine.
Seems like the HN mob is just as capricious as the author in deciding who gets as pass or not.
> Surely Linus Torvalds has said meaner things at some point on a listserv.
It boggles the mind why people keep using Linus as an excuse to justify rudeness. Linus apologised, he recognised what he did for years was not OK, and took time off to reflect and become a better person.
> Seems like the HN mob is just as capricious as the author in deciding who gets as pass or not.
Are all the people who commented in that submission commenting on this one? No? Then it’s not the same group of people, and opinions are different. There’s no “mob”, HN isn’t a hive mind. If it were, you’d be part of it and agree.
I agree that the article is strongly worded, and Andrew seems quite angry/frustrated. However, it also gives me flashbacks of how it was back in the golden days, when Linus was calling wannabe kernel contributors idiots who should have died because they "couldn't find their mothers tit to suck on".
Having low patience is a quirk of our nerd culture, and now that the woke season has ended, it seems to be going back to how it has always been!
While I generally think constructive criticism is usually the right choice, I suspect Github will never get the message unless there are some very strongly worded criticisms. In Andrew's defense, he did post some constructive evidence of things he considered problematic.
Treating people poorly isn’t a quirk of nerd culture. Even Linus doesn’t think so.
> This is my reality. I am not an emotionally empathetic kind of person and that probably doesn't come as a big surprise to anybody. Least of all me. The fact that I then misread people and don't realize (for years) how badly I've judged a situation and contributed to an unprofessional environment is not good.
> This week people in our community confronted me about my lifetime of not understanding emotions. My flippant attacks in emails have been both unprofessional and uncalled for.
> Especially at times when I made it personal. In my quest for a better patch, this made sense to me. I know now this was not OK and I am truly sorry.
The above is basically a long-winded way to get to the somewhat painful personal admission that hey, I need to change some of my behavior, and I want to apologize to the people that my personal behavior hurt and possibly drove away from kernel development entirely.
> I am going to take time off and get some assistance on how to understand people's emotions and respond appropriately.
And he walked the walk. He became better after that. Linux is a better project for it. But I suppose it did influence a generation of people in software who looked up to Linus and thought this is the correct way to treat people you perceive as beneath you.
Evidently not "clearly", given the number of people who didn't see it, but that was my first interpretation as well: I took it as an "infinite monkeys" reference that, in context, was probably standing in for "some un-tested gen AI output". Which, clicking on the link, seems to be what happened?
Anyway, yes, "infinite monkeys on typewriters" seemed to be the relevant meaning of "monkeys" here.
Thankfully, many of us are not in that "We" group you're referring. This is a toxic culture I want no part of. It says a lot about the nature of the Zig community.
Isn't that the unfortunate status quo? At least hard requirement for JS, that is.
Google's homepage started requiring this recently. Linux kernel's git, openwrt, esp32.com, and many many others now require it too, via dreaded "Making sure you're not a bot" thing:
yeah dunno why anyone would willingly use a msoft product if there was a viable alternative (i say from my windows machine doh, its for games, really!)
> Effective immediately, I have made ziglang/zig on GitHub read-only, and the canonical origin/master branch of the main Zig project repository is https://codeberg.org/ziglang/zig.git.
If there is one benefit in moving from GitHub it is certainly avoiding receiving AI slop issues on GitHub.
Github was on the decline anyway in the past 5 years, it's time for an alternative and we'll see. Would rather it being Codeberg over something like Sourcehut.
Looking at these comments, it's painfully apparent how many think that being polite in your communication is more important than actually doing something.
I agree it would have been nicer if the message was more polite. But if you compare that to having the backbone follow through with meaningful long-term changes against a corporation you don't trust or respect, there shouldn't even be a discussion.
And don't even get me started with the people who come in here just to point out that Codeberg isn't perfect either.
> I agree it would have been nicer if the message was more polite. But if you compare that to having the backbone follow through with meaningful long-term changes against a corporation you don't trust or respect, there shouldn't even be a discussion.
You’re framing it as either/or when it isn’t. You can push for real change and communicate like an adult. The two aren’t in conflict; often they reinforce each other.
> The two aren’t in conflict; often they reinforce each other
I’d think they _are_ inherently in conflict. Every person has 24 hours per day, and they can spend them on researching and doing what’s right or on reaching consensus. There is some mutual reinforcement to some extent (as it’s usually right to have a reasonable consensus on what’s the right choice), but beyond some basic level there’s always tradeoff.
And for programming language designers, I really appreciate when they make the right long-term choices even if I don’t understand initially why they were made.
The fetish for "manners" has stood in the way of every single positive societal change. It's exactly what MLK meant with the white moderate favoring a negative peace over positive change:
the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"
Just the fact of someone migrating a project to another platform during the last week of November suggests that last straws were involved. That’s more of a January or a June thing than November/December.
Fury can be a powerful motivator to commit to doing something you’ve been putting off. It also means your community announcement is going to be pretty spicy, unless you let someone else write it.
> it's painfully apparent how many think that being polite in your communication is more important than actually doing something.
The zig maintainers think that, too, thus the presence of a Code of Conduct on their website. But, as always, it's a "rules for thee, but not for me" situation - if the author was called a "monkey" by someone else, I can guarantee he would invoke the CoC to call them out, but when he does it, it's fine.
> it's painfully apparent how many think that being polite in your communication is more important than actually doing something
I absolutely agree, but people in charge of large projects/groups, in any context, should know better than to put their personal feelings and opinion on topics into the "corporate" messages they are putting out. I am guilty of this myself, no one is holier than thou, but still. AK should know better.
Nobody thinks that. They just don't think that "doing something" gives you an excuse to be an arsehole. Especially if you are hypocritically violating your own CoC.
Yes, it does. Given the choice of having a coworker that's a very nice 0.1x engineer and having a bloody annoying one that's a 10x I'll work with the 10x any day.
The internet has evolved such a Newspeak, censor-driven culture, it's sad to see. I want people to be able to tell each other "I think this is shit and here's why".
Politeness is free and easy, it's not a big ask and it's certainly not an either-or.
I wouldn't even call it politeness, it's more like basic human decency. Would Andrew Kelly appreciate it if the LLVM guys publicly wrote a blog post calling the Zig maintainers losers and monkeys? Just screams of immaturity, which isn't surprising seeing their political views.
This. The round & slimy language is what big corps do. I don't like how this post is written – but what really matters here is that they are doing a good job moving away from GitHub. I hope more OSS does this.
Despite what majority are defending here, I love how Zig phrased out their blog. We're not in fake enterprise, where HR is guiding your language, calling you family and then fire you whenever convenient to them.
This language by Andrew is natural, real and should be valued more than anything else. Thank you, it's a refresher and it reminds me an old internet, where everyone been really free to write what and how they wanted it to be.
Who are you after all to judge how he writes his opinions?
Did you even read the article. Yes, he had 1 sentence on ICE, which maybe you disagree with its politics. But most of the article was with technical issues in github as a platform and its neglect of non AI features. Please take your low quality comment to X.
Finally, I can’t believe I have to say it, but a creator of an open source project is free to infuse it with whatever values he wants, no one hates on SQLite, no need to hate someone for adding his brand of politics / values to his passion project. Please go create your own “non woke” language if you hate it so much.
sounds about right to me. fuck github. if github can do whatever they want in the name of progress then surely they'd survive being called a monkey. anything with microsoft's name on it was designed by a drug-addled albatross.
instead of crying about zig's coc they should work on that abomination of a framework.
I thought those of you who said he was being offensive were more or less justified in saying it here. Then I read the post. Literally nothing offensive. Calling someone a code-monkey has been around for as long as I can remember. If throughout your career you haven't questioned yourself "am I a code monkey?" at least once you're either incredibly smart or incredibly stupid.
I can't agree with him more that Github went to absolute shit and I can feel React crap emanating from it without even looking at the code. There's everything in the world wrong with React and I would easily call anyone advocating it a code-monkey in their face. It's not about JavaScript itself - it's about the framework ideas, which are absolute trash. If anyone's offended by a code-monkey, I feel like maybe they should be.
you say this like it's some own or something, but I'd be more surprised if they didn't. believe it or not, they are already donating some of their funds to the upstream ecosystem[0].
> As a bonus, we look forward to fewer violations (exhibit A, B, C) of our strict no LLM / no AI policy,
Hilarious how the offender on "exhibit A" [1] is the same one from the other post that made the frontpage a couple of days ago [2].
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46039274
My old rule about the difference between coding and software engineering:
My new rule:
> For coding, you can use AI to write your code. For software engineering, you can't.
You can 100% use AI for software engineering. Just not by itself, you need to currently be quite engaged in the process to check it and redirect it.
But AI lowers the barrier to writing code and thus it brings people will less rigour to the field and they can do a lot of damage. But it isn't significantly different than programming languages made coding more accessible than assembly language - and I am sure that this also allowed more people to cause damage.
You can use any tools you want, but you have to be rigorous about it no matter the tool.
> For coding, you can use AI to write your code. For software engineering, you can't.
This is a pretty common sentiment. I think it equates using AI with vibe-coding, having AI write code without human review. I'd suggest amending your rule to this:
> For coding, you can use AI. For software engineering, you can't.
You can use AI in a process compatible with software engineering. Prompt it carefully to generate a draft, then have a human review and rework it as needed before committing. If the AI-written code is poorly architected or redundant, the human can use the same AI to refactor and shape it.
Now, you can say this negates the productivity gains. It will necessarily negate some. My point is that the result is comparable to human-written software (such as it is).
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I absolutely don't care about how people generate code, but they are responsible for every single line they push for review or merge.
That's my policy in each of my clients and it works fine, if AI makes something simpler/faster, good for the author, but there's 0, none, excuses for pushing slop or code you haven't reviewed and tested yourself thoroughly.
If somebody thinks they can offset not just authoring or editing code, but also taking the responsibility for it and the impact it has on the whole codebase and the underlying business problem they should be jobless ASAP as they are de facto delegating the entirety of their job to a machine, they are not only providing 0 value, but negative value in fact.
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I feel like the distinction is equivalent to
Humans can and do make mistakes all the time. LLMs can automate most of the boring stuff, including unit tests with 100% coverage. They can cover edge cases you ask them to and they can even come up with edge cases you may not have thought about. This leaves you to do the review.
I think think the underlying problem people have is they don't trust themselves to review code written by others as much as they trust themselves to implement the code from scratch. Realistically, a very small subset of developers do actual "engineering" to the level of NASA / aerospace. Most of us just have inflated egos.
I see no problem modelling the problem, defining the components, interfaces, APIs, data structures, algorithms and letting the LLM fill in the implementation and the testing. Well designed interfaces are easy to test anyway and you can tell at a glance if it covered the important cases. It can make mistakes, but so would I. I may overlook something when reviewing, but the same thing often happens when people work together. Personally I'd rather do architecture and review at a significantly improved speed than gloat I handcrafted each loop and branch as if that somehow makes the result safer or faster (exceptions apply, ymmv).
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Check out this dude: https://github.com/GhostKellz?tab=repositories
He's got like 50 repos with vibe-coded, non-working Zig and Rust projects. And he clearly manages to confuse people with it:
https://github.com/GhostKellz/zquic/issues/2
I don’t think this is uncommon. At one point Lemmy was a project with thousands of stars and literally no working code until finally someone other than the owner adopted it and merged in a usable product.
Wow, and if you go to their website listed in they're profile, not only do almost none of the links work, the one that did just linked out to the generic template that it was straight copied from. Wow.
It is questionable if they've even tried any one of them.
Hustle hustle. I'm not disgusted by this person, but by the system that promotes or requires such behaviour.
oh god... he has a humongous AI generated PR for julia too https://github.com/tshort/StaticCompiler.jl/pull/180
More context/discussion on this: https://discourse.julialang.org/t/ai-generated-enhancements-...
(Honestly, that's a lot more patience than I'd be able to give what are mostly AI-generated replies, so kudos to these folk.)
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Maybe this guy is it: the actual worst coder in the world
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I guess we now have the equivalent of cowboy builders but for software now. Except no one asked for anything to be built in this case lol.
The people of Jonestown collectively drank less kool-aid than all this.
I don't know whether to be worried or impressed.
I had $1000 in Claude credits and went to town.
Yes, I made mistakes along the way.
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My favorite of his https://x.com/joelreymont/status/1990981118783352952
> Claude discovered a bug in the Zig compiler and is in the process of fixing it!
...a few minutes later...
https://github.com/ziglang/zig/pull/25974
I can see a future job interview scenario:
- "What would you say is your biggest professional accomplishment, Joel?"
- "Well, I almost single-highhandedly drove Zig away from Github"
> Well, I almost single-highhandedly drove Zig away from Github
If you think about it, Joel is net positive to Zig and its community!
Those overly enthusiastic responses from the LLM are really going to do a number on people's egos.
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I'm not sure if this is advanced trolling at this point.
This is redefining the cutting edge of trolling.
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I'll one up you: at this point I'm becoming pretty sure that this is a person who actually hates LLMs, who is trying to poison the well by trying to give other people reasons to hate LLMs too.
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Is the. AI bubble just biolliinaires larping about their favorite dystopuan scifi?
Ah. I remember that guy. Joel. He sold his poker server and bragged around HN long time ago. He is too much of PR stunt guy recently. Unfortunately AI does not lead to people being nice in the end. The way people abuse other people using AI is crazy. Kudos to ocaml owners giving him a proper f-off but polite response.
>MAJOR BREAKTHROUGH ACHIEVED
the bootlicking behavior must must be like crack for wannabes. jfc
>I did not write a single line of code but carefully shepherded AI over the course of several days and kept it on the straight and narrow.
>AI: I need to keep track of variables moving across registers. This is too hard, let’s go shopping… Me: Hey, don’t any no shortcuts!
>My work was just directing, shaping, cajoling and reviewing.
How people can say that without the slightest bit of reflection on whether they're right or just spitting BS
I agree that's a funny coincidence. But, what about the change it wanted to commit? It is at least slightly interesting. It is doubly interesting that changing line 638 neither breaks nor fixes any test.
There's a tweet with a Claude screenshot with a bit more context (linked on the PR).
I don't know enough about the project to know if it makes any sense, but the Zig contributor seemed confused (at least about the title).
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Perhaps the offset is always zero anyway in that scenario
But yeah hard to say
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That one was poorly documented and may have been related to an issue in my code.
I would offer this one instead.
https://github.com/joelreymont/zig/pull/1
Can you stop wasting everyone’s time?
Just reading his blogposts, gross. He not only thinks he is actively contributing, he thinks he deserves credit.
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Even after the public call-outs you keep dropping blatant ads for your blog and AI in general in your PRs; there's no other word for them than ads. This is why I blocked you on the OCaml forum already.
When I was a kid, every year I'd get so obsessed about Christmas toys that the hype would fill my thoughts to the point I'd feel dizzy and throw up. I genuinely think you're going through the adult version of that: your guts might be ok but your mind is so filled with hype that you're losing self-awareness.
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I wonder why the maintainers haven't banned this dude yet.
Stop the catfishes, please
> As a bonus, we look forward to fewer violations (exhibit A, B, C) of our strict no LLM / no AI policy, which I believe are at least in part due to GitHub aggressively pushing the “file an issue with Copilot” feature in everyone’s face.
Also, the big part of that issue is people are incentivized to make their GitHub profile look good to have a higher chance of getting hired. Any non-mainstream platform is not as compelling to get social credits.
> Also, the big part of that issue is people are incentivized to make their GitHub profile look good to have a higher chance of getting hired.
Do people really get hired for bunch of PRs to random repos on GH or just think they will? My impression has always been that GH profile is completely ignored by both recruiters and interviewers.
And this kind of behaviour is a red flag for people who actually go digging through the GitHub profile. Like techical people in the last stages of a hiring process.
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I've seen quite a few HR hiring processes where a mediocre HR person (knows to look for GH profile + activity on that, but not how to evaluate them) is paired with engineers with too little input power. In those processes, people that game their GH profiles tend to benefit.
Issues and Pull requests are only optional features . Open source projects could always use GitHub as just git host/mirror like how torvalds/linux is setup .
PRs are not optional: there is no way to disable them on GitHub. I can't be sure that this is intentional, but it certainly works out well for them that this is one of many properties which make it quite difficult to migrate away from the platform.
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PRs aren't an optional feature, though acting on PRs is obviously optional; nothing prevents you from ignoring or (even automatically) closing all PRs from anyone who is not on a list of approved contributors.
Pull requests are not optional on GitHub. Users have been begging for more than a decade for an option to disable pull request for a repository, and GitHub continues to ignore them.
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Not long back we were all urged to take CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md seriously. I've arrived at a place where the next thing I open source will include such a file which discusses not sending slop to the repository.
When the metrics becomes a target, ladida. GitHub profiles are utterly meaningless to me, speaking as someone that was hiring folks in 2023–4.
Perhaps we need an app to keep track of bad job candidates. We can gossip about them and such. I mean, we did that for an entire gender (sex?), let's go make a unicorn.
I don’t have strong opinions about Zig or Codeberg, but I find the self-described status of the latter’s infrastructure concerning[1]: they’re seemingly running faulty hardware in production with limited redundancy, and are actively soliciting more hardware of unknown quality/reliability/provenance from their community. This is cool for a hobbyist project, but it doesn’t scream “stable platform for a post-GitHub world,” which is how I’ve seen Codeberg (aspirationally) described.
[1]: https://blog.codeberg.org/letter-from-codeberg-onwards-and-u...
Reading the infra part of the post made me smile, I spent part of my week putting workloads on spot but this is the real spot market. Chaos monkey is running in prod if you are ready for it or not.
Jokes aside, the technical depth it takes to make that one server run is impressive. That makes me more interested in codeberg, not less, though I’m going to keep my own mirror of the zig repo until they get some better hardware.
To be clear, I’m not knocking it; I also like to reuse old computers. But it’s incongruous with replacing GitHub, rather that being a “weirdo hobbyist” version of GitHub.
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> we hope to use direct solar power to operate CI/CD nodes only during sunshine hours
Status: CI down due to cloud issues.
I would like to know the reasoning why Zig chose Codeberg instead of self-hosting something like gitea or forgejo.
Seems to be a safer bet to limit hosting related weaknesses and unknowns, considering move from github being quite disruptive already.
We always have the option of exiting Codeberg to a self-hosted Forgejo instance if that should become necessary for some reason. (Not that I expect it will, considering Codeberg is a non-profit.)
We do self-host all our CI machines.
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One great thing about Forejo is that you can have a FreeBSD builder and on GH you cannot, have to spin up a slow VM.
It seems like they have reliability issues; if I read their status page correctly, they have incidents every few minutes. Or how should one read their all green page?
They've abandoned GitHub for Codeberg because GitHub has ICE as a customer. Codeberg uses Paypal which is a member of the ICE "Virtual Global Taskforce".
https://www.ice.gov/news/releases/top-story-industry-partner...
There is a purity spiral that organizations can enter when they start doing this, which ends up with you shoving yourself into a cold dark corner of the internet and still not being completely detached from the badness because Cisco provides infrastructure for nearly every major weapons manufacturer and defense department globally.
> There is a purity spiral that organizations can enter when they start doing this
You are the one summoning that spiral by making a cheap gotcha wrt codeberg using Paypal.
The project apparently could and did move because the swith from github to codeberg wasn't that big of an impact, and because, while the new forge is not perfect, they feel the association is less severe. There is no "purity spiral" in that, just a pragmatic choice factoring in ethics.
Right, that seemed like a minor issue. There was also the minor issue of the increase of AI code PRs. Seems like the greater issue was a perception of deterioration of the platform (in their sites for years) and a reasonable path towards migration to another platform.
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As I was reading your reply I was half convinced that it was not purity spiral but by the end, even you admit it’s an ethics thing so yeah it is pretty much purity spiral in place. Next they will leave the USA so that they won’t be associated with Trump.
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Sounds great because Zig folks do seem to have a history with rejecting existing tooling for fussy reasons and building their own (really good) stuff.
If this forces them to rethink and build a better GitHub, can't wait.
I think there's a difference between providing services to X and a platform using a payment processor that collaborates with X.
You have a point, of course, but for many options, the best we can do is avoid the worst one as there's no perfect solution. I'm not saying that people should leave GitHub because of this, but I can see why some would and why they may pick a different, still not perfect, alternative instead of doing everything themselves.
There's nothing that compels you to "purity spiral" other than attempting to appease cynics who insist that all decisions must be completely binary and consistent, with no room for nuance or practicality, and that anything else is virtue signaling (which is somehow less defensible than enabling harm in the first place).
Reducing harm where feasible is still meaningful, and certainly better than no attempt at all.
That's a weird take-away from the post, where the only time ICE is mentioned is
> Putting aside GitHub’s relationship with ICE,
and the rest of the article provides technical reasons.
I feel like that's the whole point of the OP. I agree with the overall post but mentioning the ICE relationship seems to detract from the main point.
"I hate GitHub because X Y and Z features are bad" is a good reason to move away; "I hate GitHub because one of their thousands of enterprise customers does not align with my political views" is not, in my opinion.
For the record, I do not support ICE
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>and the rest of the article provides technical reasons
The post ends with an indictment of capitalism.
Levels of indirection matter.
It seems like every organization in America is compromised in some way if you dig deep enough. Certainly you can find reasons for every big tech. There's still a balance to be struck though.
> It seems like every organization in America is compromised in some way if you dig deep enough.
I agree, and my view is that it goes much further. Quoting author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn:
"The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts.".
If by dig you mean lazily sweep the front door while listening to dance music, then yes, I agree with you :)
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when the shit finally starts flying there is no better place to be than low down, in a dark corner, with clean hands, looking nothing like a pig
[dead]
And with no money or users....
Levels of indirections matter.
You're mad because they left a vendor because they switched to a different vendor that you think is just as bad but also you're accusing them of starting an "inevitable purity spiral?" Which one is it?
It didn't seem to me that the person you answered to was "mad". Are you "mad" because of what they wrote?
It's not in conflict. They are pointing out that in this case their stated goal was not achieved so it's pointless.
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We’re all sick of these activist dorks
So much vague outrage over nothing. That CI system created by so called monkeys is the one of the best free CI service in the world. Not everyone has the millions of dollars like Zig Foundation to create their own CI servers.
After that they appreciate GitHub Sponsors, but say it is now a complete liability just because a project leader left. What are the actual changes? Any new rule? But no, it is now a "liability" and we should accept it.
Honestly speaking I like how big projects are exploring new hosting options. But there is no need to attack other platforms like this to promote your new host.
> So much vague outrage over nothing.
So you just chose to ignore the technical problems we have with GitHub Actions and then say there are no problems. That's certainly a take.
> That CI system created by so called monkeys is the one of the best free CI service in the world.
We self-host all our CI machines so the "free" hosted runners have no relevance here.
> Not everyone has the millions of dollars like Zig Foundation to create their own CI servers.
We don't have "millions of dollars". If only!
I'd also note that we spend our money very efficiently; most of our CI machines are consumer-grade hardware hosted in team member's homes. We don't just throw endless amounts of money at cloud providers.
> After that they appreciate GitHub Sponsors, but say it is now a complete liability just because a project leader left. What are the actual changes? Any new rule? But no, it is now a "liability" and we should accept it.
GitHub Sponsors is a liability because Microsoft can increase their cut at any time, or even axe it outright if they don't think it's profitable for them anymore. This risk is very real considering that, as Andrew pointed out, the feature has been neglected for years. It is objectively less risky for us to have donors use a platform like Every.org.
Can’t any donation platform you don’t fully control cut you off at any point?
What exactly is different about GitHub sponsors here?
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Anyone who has ever used Gitlab, or dare my foul mouth say Jenkins, has experienced a better system than Github actions.
Unless it's miraculously improved recently as it's been a couple years for me, they didn't even document their regex/pattern matching. Best I could find via searching was that it was whatever Ruby used, which wasn't any kind of real standard.
I don't want to call anyone names, but whoever defends said system deserves some ribbing.
I've used both and I don't know if they've been improved but both were terrible a few years ago (at least in our case). Very unstable and finicky. I last used Jenkins in 2017 and Gitlab in 2021, so I don't know how they are today.
Gitlab smokes and rolls githubs shitty ass CI all day any day for over 10 years now
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What? Jenkins? No way.
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The best free CI system in the world has macOS 15 runners running at 75% capacity due to a background process that consumes 100% CPU [1]. The problem is known to them since May but not fixed half a year later.
[1] https://github.com/actions/runner-images/issues/13358
So tell us where is the better free macOS CI provider? I would love to switch to them.
That is what I meant by the BEST FREE CI provider. It is not the best if you have money for something better.
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Unfortunately I don’t really know what a CI provider should do to fix this.
They fixed it 8 hours after your comment lol
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> That CI system created by so called monkeys is the one of the best free CI service in the world.
It really isn't (look at Gitlab's for comparison), the only advantage of Github CI is that it offers free Mac runners.
Well nothing is better than anything else other than the things that make it better.
You are not talking a out github actions? Monkeys would have done it better.
And yet there are millions of monkeys out there who've produced nothing.
The only good thing about it is their very generous limits for "open source" projects (it doesn't even have to be free software AFAIK, just the source has to be visible to everyone).
The CI service itself is an absolute trash fire caused by the usual Microsoft NIH, and if they have financial means not to deal with it anymore, I see no reason for them to waste their limited development time on dealing with it.
Where else would the CI service for a Microsoft product be invented? NIH is a weird insult in this context. If Microsoft had instead acquired a CI service you’d be complaining about how they’re reducing competition.
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>it doesn't even have to be free software AFAIK, just the source has to be visible to everyone
With the implication that MS is free to harvest it for LLM training?
They could have easily done that without all the insults.
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I'm pretty sure the Zig Foundation does not have millions of dollars, contrary to Microsoft which has a market capitalization in the trillions, but consistently produces flaming garbage, product after product.
CI's job for me is to just run a nix flake
the technical issues are completely valid. at the same time, there is a balance between citing reasons for the change and burning bridges with those you leave behind.
the friction caused for the supporters felt a bit tone deaf. although the project itself runs on strong principles so i can imagine they know what they signed up for.
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Unsure if this post is being astroturfed or not, but seeing HackerNews root for Microsoft and boo communities that embrace alternatives feels very, anti-hacker in mentality.
Sad state of affairs
I don’t think people are questioning the move away from a gigacorp owned platform, but it’s the approach, the alternative chosen, and the brash language that are being questioned
Hacker News is a misnomer. This is a VC and FAANG mercenary watering hole.
There was a short time period between when Balmer left and the beginning of Windows desktop enshittification with ads and the (frankly insufferable) AI hype where Microsoft appeared to be on the right path. A saner Microsoft acquiring Github could have actually turned out to be a good thing, but alas...
> where Microsoft appeared to be on the right path
Only to the hopelessly naive.
I'm not rooting for Microsoft, but comments like this:
> with the remaining rookies eager to inflict some kind of bloated, buggy JavaScript framework on us in the name of progress.
and
> More importantly, Actions is created by monkeys
are juvenile.
While juvenile, it is a fair point that github and all websites that ditch everything for javascript get less snappy to use.
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> Putting aside GitHub’s relationship with ICE, it’s abundantly clear that the talented folks who used to work on the product have moved on to bigger and better things, with the remaining losers eager to inflict some kind of bloated, buggy JavaScript framework on us in the name of progress.
This says more about the author than anything else.
That they don't support a nationalistic paramilitary organization that requires its members to be masked and never known by the public so they cant be held accountable? A nationalized KKK is not something to ever support.
I don't care about ICE one way or another, but calling people "monkeys" and "losers" because they're not building a product to your exact specifications is extremely childish.
It seems to me that the real "losers" are the ones spending so much time bitching and moaning about a software platform they don't like.
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The author of the article is the creator of the Zig language.
This is par for the course for him. He's quite a bit like Linus [1].
He needs to start following his own advice [2].
[1] https://mastodon.social/@andrewrk/112362751644363647
[2] https://andrewkelley.me/post/open-letter-everyone-butted-hea...
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But they renamed the master branch, doesn't that excuse any ICE associations?
> Thank you to the Forgejo contributors who helped us with our issues switching to the platform, as well as the Codeberg folks who worked with us on the migration - in particular Earl Warren, Otto, Gusted, and Mathieu Fenniak.
To me this said more than anything else in the post. The fact that there are genuine people at forgejo/codeburg that give a thought about what they are working on is pure gold.
In my experience a lot of Free software communities are like this.
I'm happy to see the move. Codeberg is probably a more stable/long-term solution than SourceHut as the founder is slightly unhinged (but love what he has built). Honestly, either would have been great choices.
More opensource projects should move off GitHub. I moved off it myself.
I am getting fatigued by all of these. I am learning about a new one each time. We have
They all seem to do roughly the same things, but with a different web UI. Competition is great! Especially in response to a big corp that has market share. But... there was value in the centralization of GH.
there is value in interoperability, not in centralization
> They all seem to do roughly the same things
Codeberg (Forgejo) is Free software, GitHub isn't. Not everything is about the software features.
I’m pretty sure Drew has stepped away from SourceHut. It’s kind of a bummer SourceHut stuck so stubbornly to mailing list only workflows. Everything else about the platform is great.
Drew is still working on SourceHut:
https://sourcehut.org/blog/2025-11-20-whats-cooking-q4-2025/
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I believe Drew was taking a "break" from it, but not stepping away in any permanent sense. It's probably better for him to stay involved. I'd like to see him push his idea further. It's great to have options.
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I agree that there is a steep learning curve compared to Github pull requests or Gitlab merge requests, but like many things the steep learning curve actually hides a very powerful tool. A famous example is the Linux Kernel, a project of such a size that simply can not work with the Github/Gitlab model.
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> I'm happy to see the move. Codeberg is probably a more stable/long-term solution than SourceHut as the founder is slightly unhinged
What's this about?
Maybe the incident:
https://dmpwn.info/
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Anyone who has read Drew de vault's blog for some time reaches the same conclusion it seems.
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Biggest problem of SourceHut that should be solved first before mass migration of open source - lack of the organizations that would allow multiple contributors working on the project, especially the project with multiple repositories.
PSA: Codeberg currently does not implement accessible account registration. It is impossible for screen reader users to make a Codeberg account due to the image-only captcha. There's a manual fallback path, but no idea how long that takes. I've been forced to use the Wikimedia one, and that was about 3 months. This has been pointed out to them many times, and it's seemingly not something they're willing to fix.
If you didn't know what Codeberg's political stance really is and how they treat the inconvenient part of their userbase... I guess now you know.
> This has been pointed out to them many times, and it's seemingly not something they're willing to fix.
On the exact page you're on is a link to an issue [0] acknowledging that the CAPTCHA is inaccessible and expressing that they plan to drop it (albeit with no concrete time-frame). I don't at all understand your argument that Codeberg must be slow at replying to emails (the "manual fallback path") because Wikimedia are; these are two completely unrelated entities and I don't see why you would make inferences about one from the other.
[0]: https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/Community/issues/1797
It greatly saddens me to see how little concern there is for accessibility for dev tooling. It says something about our industry that accessibility is often viewed as a “luxury” feature that can be dealt with once you’ve reached some level of success or revenue or whatever.
I’m hopeful AI tools can improve qol for those who require screen readers and similar tools but have a sinking feeling that it will only transfer even more of the burden for accessible access from operator to user.
> It greatly saddens me to see how little concern there is for accessibility for dev tooling.
This really depends on company size, and the company in question.
Everything Microsoft does in this space is excellent, VS Code almost feels like an app specifically designed for the blind at times. Other large companies aren't as good, but their products are usually somewhat usable.
Startups are a mixed bag, Zed is notoriously and completely inaccessible for example. Most SaaS tools wouldn't pass an audit but can be used with significant annoyances.
Open Source is usually pretty bad. GTK still doesn't do any accessibility on non-Linux platforms. QT used to be completely inaccessible, although they've significantly improved in the last couple years. Linux in general has major issues that makes it almost unusable unless you understand it at a very deep level, and maybe not even then.
Accessibility isn't a sexy thing to do, so unless you're practicing manager-driven development, nobody wants to work on it.
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I wonder why they didn't just enable audio captchas, which are supported by the captcha package I wrote that they use.
How is accessibility a political issue?
How is it not? In the not so distant past of the 1930s there were political parties advocating for the mass killing of people with disabilities, or at least the sterilization of those with heritable disabilities. There have been real campaigns in that period that did this type of forced sterilization, especially in some mental hospitals. You'll still find people espousing such beliefs, thankfully at the fringes for now.
Accessibility is the opposite position of that - but it's by no means a universally accepted good, unfortunately, especially when it requires extra effort to implement.
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Calling the people who work on GitHub “losers” is not cool.
Look at the absolute state of what they are working on. If they are not losers, they are dispirited clock-punchers who don't care about their craft.
It’s more likely that most of them are competent professionals doing their best in an impersonal corporate environment, just like the rest of us.
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They could also just be people with bills to pay who are maybe faced with—by some accounts—a very challenging employment market. Or maybe due to disabilities they find the process of finding new work difficult or impossible.
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Github is migrating from their old infra to Azure. Doing migrations like that is hard, no matter who you are. And from a business and engineering perspective I think it makes sense to leverage the economies of scale of Azure instead of GitHub running their own boxes.
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The absolute state of Github is that I use it dozens of times a day and it works flawlessly, for free, with intermittent outages.
Microsoft is doing more with Github than I can say for most of their products. I won't go to bat for the Xbox or Windows teams, but Github is... fine. Almost offensively usable.
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> they are dispirited clock-punchers who don't care about their craft.
Interestingly that is synonymous with losers according the definition of it in gervais principle. Which weirdly makes being called a loser less of an insult. (More like realist)
I’m sure this isn’t directed at everyone that works at GH, but it would have been more tactful to fault the people making decisions. Those frustrations are real though.
It is actually.
"I also strongly believe that you should not be proud of working for Microsoft, and particularly on GitHub for the last 5 years. I truly am sorry but you need to be called out."
https://hachyderm.io/@andrewrk@mastodon.social/1156234452984...
Is it really a surprise that the project that declared a blanket ban on LLM-generated code is also emotional and childish in other areas?
A blanket ban on LLM-generated code is a completely reasonable position. If someone couldn't be bothered to write the code, why should anyone else bother to read it, let alone merge it?
Not wanting to review and maintain code that someone didn't even bother to write themselves is childish?
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I don't see how the two are related at all. A blanket ban on LLM-generated code is at least arguably a reasonable policy.
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Given my own experience working on compiler stuff with LLM, I'd say it's a very good decision.
LLMs jump at the first opportunity to use regex for EVERYTHING instead of doing proper lexing/parsing, for example. You need to repeatedly tell it not to use regex. In the end you might as well hand write your code, because you actually know how it works, unlike a clueless LLM.
No wonder they moved to Codeberg. Those kinds of projects tend to do the ol' move to Codeberg for whatever reason. If I had to put an analogy to it, Codeberg is like Kick and Github is like Twitch.
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You know what else isn't cool? Working at GitHub!
More seriously: I probably wouldn't have called every single current employee of GitHub a "loser", but more because I think truly cool people don't define themselves by where they happen to work at any given time. I'm sure the vast majority of people at GitHub are just tech employees trying to earn a living and don't particularly care whether the Zig guy thinks they're cool or not. What actually matters is that GitHub is a big centralized platform run by Microsoft for their own ends, and it's good to be free of it.
Holy shit, some people in the Zig community are toxic af. By extension, this means the community itself has issues it needs to face.
Not only have some of these folks - including the creator - been shitting in Rust threads, but here they're in here shitting on the awesome engineers at Github for no reason at all.
Good god.
edit: this is written by Andrew, the creator. The culture is rotten from the head.
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”.
i’m really twisting my finger at the temple here.
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You have accused me of "shitting in Rust threads". Do you have any evidence for this libel?
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Oh no! Not the poor Microserf drones! I will play a dirge on the world's smallest violin while they count down the days until stock vesting.
I'm not sure that your unsupported assertion represents a substantive contribution to this discussion. Why do you believe it's not cool, munchler?
It's bully behavior.
It reminds me of the creeps in school that punched me, shoved me into lockers, tried to assault me.
I almost killed myself as a kid because of bullies. Some people never grow out of that, it seems.
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I'm excited to see this migration happen, mostly because it signals to us (https://tangled.org) that large projects are willing to switch! We're working pretty hard to get Tangled out of alpha—we want it to be the place for free software communities.
Also recently wrote about our vision and commitment to indies and communities (and never enterprise!): https://anirudh.fi/future
> Stacked pull requests using Jujutsu's change IDs.
Now I'm very interested. Will definitely give it a try.
Aside: Bluesky PDSes are configured to let you upload up to 100MB per blob. Perhaps it might be worth exploring as a medium for hosting release artifacts? Maybe the web interface can merge multiple blobs as fragments of large release files exceeding 100MB (or 15MB for PDSes using the out-of-box config which seems to be the case for Tangled’s instance)
You can already do this for tags, but manually. Via CI, you’ll need to set an app password and use goat (https://tangled.org/oppi.li/goat) or similar.
Keep up the great work!
Very questionable decision.
You're running what aims to be a major programming language - have it where people expect and live with your gripes about the platform.
In retail you set up your store in the biggest mall with the most customers walking past - sure you can go set up in some back alley but don't expect customers to come to your store. This remains true even if the mall owns forget to mop the floor.
This feels immature and does not give confidence in the project/language leadership.
> You're running what aims to be a major programming language - have it where people expect and live with your gripes about the platform.
The core types who will make use of, contribute to, and/or otherwise use the repo likely don't need it to be on GitHub. Having it "where people expect" is useful for drive-by contributions but Zig doesn't really need that.
Furthermore, why should we as a larger community cede things to GitHub and Microsoft? It doesn't change unless larger parties move the needle.
None of this means that you have to be on a specific platform. GitHub as default/mandatory is a single point of failure for the entire tech industry.
For an example of another language that avoids being entirely coupled into Github, Go has it's real code hosting and CI interaction on a Gerrit instance, with some sync back and forth to GitHub for a few items.
The CI pain and operational blindness mentioned in the Zig post is entirely real.
Yeah but marketing matters for Zig because it's still struggling to get significant mindshare.
Zig needs to behave more mainstream rather than less and technical gripes about the source hosting platform should not matter more than marketing.
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It's just a public git repository and issue tracker, not a frigging "store front". People don't "discover" Zig because its source repository being hosted on Github vs some other random URL (and creating a bug report or PR appears to work exactly like on GH anyways: https://codeberg.org/ziglang/zig).
> This feels immature and does not give confidence in the project/language leadership.
so making tough decisions is now immature this days lol.
> mall owns forget to mop the floor
quite a whitewashing i would say.
The messaging is questionable, but strengthening an open source alternative to a microsoft near-monopoly seems pretty good.
Perhaps people should stop expecting all source code to be on a microsoft platform?
I think it's a broader cultural issue where everyone has to have strong opinions about everything and make a strong stand - instead of picking your battles
Not that I necessarily disagree with their reasoning, but stick to having strong feelings about your core "mission"? It just feels a bit "unstable". Hard to imagine such stuff coming from Java or Python or whatever other major language
It's a programming language, not a tool for end users. The intersection of people for who Zig being hosted on github is helpful with the people who are going to interact with the code source is basically none
It might even reduce the numbr of slop PRs they get.
Who are people? People in USA? Where I live it's frankly a positive if you're on a different base than github. SQLite seems to manage fine without github, so I'm not sure why you think Zig isn't going to be. That being said I don't necessarily disagree with your position on maturity, SQLite has an official github mirror after all. Even if you don't want to bother with that there are a lot of ways to write about it without calling people monkeys.
SQLite doesn’t really accept PRs[0], so I don’t think is comparable here. The SQLite model is great for their purposes but I doubt it’s suited to a community-based open contribution setup.
[0]: https://sqlite.org/copyright.html#:~:text=Open%2DSource%2C%2...
For established projects of a certain level of audience and attention, they can be hosted anywhere and it won't matter all that much. Zig is already such a project. People already know about Zig. There's tons of established projects that don't use GitHub (some migrated, some never used it) and they're fine.
Eh. Their messaging is immature here, but you don't need to be on the biggest thing - especially when you have a limited set of contributiors, not millions.
It is deeply unfortunate that Git won instead of Mercurial and even more unfortunate that GitHub won. GitHub's code review/PR UI is an abomination. We had better tools 15 years ago and GitHub is still a regression. There are tons of reasons to move off it if you're willing to pay the cost of working with alternatives.
I wonder why they did not choose Sourcehut or were they on there at some point?
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Ah yes, I always look for big box Warhammer 40k stores in malls.
I agree. I usually nope out of projects not on GitHub until someone builds an alternative that seems solid. I am surprised none of the major Linux distros have built one yet. I could see it being better funded if a few major Linux distros decided to host their own. Ubuntu had theirs but it uses a custom source control system so its niche to Ubuntu itself.
Some of the best news I have read all week. We do not need to bend the knee to US megacorporations & proprietary code forges for open source. I hope this causes bigger discussions—especially including locking chat to platforms like Discord along the same lines.
Apart from his skills and Zig work, this guy sounds like an angry teen or Linus wannabe .His tone makes Zig look like a one egoistic man show even it is not.
Damn - Codeberg is snappy! It's as fast as Github used to be 10 years ago. Server rendered pages. No AJAX-style slow updates. Love it.
This was the very first thing I noticed when we (the Zig team) started seriously trialing Codeberg. Honestly, the transition was worth it just for the ability to navigate the website without a 3-5 second wait every time I click a link.
Codeberg performance is not good today - 12 seconds per click before any update. Not sure if they're able to scale.
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Not snappy at all for me.
Github is backend rendered too...
GitHub seems to be the worst of both worlds - partially rendered on the server, but then the frontend inexplicably pulls in additional data like... commit messages??
It's a double hit of latency, and for bonus points, the commit messages won't load at all if your browser is slightly out of date
It was. Open a huge diff in it now and go grab some dinner while your browser tries to render it.
I don’t hate GitHub or anything, but its UI is way slower now than it use to be.
I like Zig for the most part but this post does seem needlessly mean spirited. I don't like Microsoft or GitHub either, but I don't see the point of taking pot shots at the devs who work there.
This just in: Software engineer with motivation and skills to develop a new language, strangely lacking in PR and marketing skills. More at 11.
Surprising or not, doesn't change what I said.
And I this case it is a little surprising. Andrew is generally a pretty nice dude, has gone out of his way to try and make a fairly welcoming community. The Zig foundation also has Loris, who normally handles PR stuff, so he could have written this instead of Andrew.
Finally, that's such a bullshit stereotype. Plenty of people in the software world are perfectly friendly and articulate.
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You call the GitHub folks “monkeys” and “rookies” and at the end you “humbly” ask people to donate off? That is pretty depressing to see.
I used to look up to the Zig folks…
"rookies" is an edit - he originally said "losers"
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The arguments seem... really weak ? They just linked to some random obscure bug and an obscure OS not being supported in containers (and I'd imagine solution being "just bring your own runner").
I have... questions about Zig leadership
> obscure OS not being supported
Believe it or not, there are platforms outside of the big 3.
The GitHub Actions runner does not work on FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, and illumos, all of which are operating systems we either have existing support for, or intend to start supporting properly soon. (We already have FreeBSD CI; machines for the other 3 are arriving at my place tomorrow as it happens.)
And that's ignoring CPU architectures; the upstream GitHub Actions runner only supports x86 and aarch64. We had to maintain a fork that adds support for all the other architectures we care about such as riscv, loongarch, s390x, etc. We will also likely be adding mips64 and powerpc64 to the mix in the future.
Even IBM have to maintain an s390x fork because Microsoft can't even be bothered to accept PRs that add more platforms: https://github.com/uweigand/runner
> We already have FreeBSD CI; machines for the other 3 are arriving at my place tomorrow as it happens.
That's great. I hope it works out, and you have CI for NetBSD, OpenBSD, and illumos, too.
Go's support for NetBSD has been a big boon to the more casual NetBSD user who isn't going to maintain a port. It means a random Go open-source project you use probably works on NetBSD already, or if it doesn't, it can be fixed upstream. Maybe Zig could play a similar role.
It's a shame GitHub doesn't have native CI even for FreeBSD on x86-64. I can see the economic case against it, of course. That said, the third-party Cross-Platform GitHub Action (https://github.com/cross-platform-actions/action) has made Free/Net/OpenBSD CI practical for me. I have used it in many projects. The developer is currently working on OmniOS support in https://github.com/cross-platform-actions/omnios-builder.
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> They just linked to some random obscure bug
A bug that they have encountered, have reported, with a description of the root cause, and has not been fixed. A bug that has wasted their time and money.
Do the arguments have to be strong? I do not think they need to provide any justification. If the core developers decided that they would be more happy (or less miserable) with a different service, then let them.
If they are not why bother ?
"We don't like being hosted under microsoft due their business practices" is perfectly fine argument, no need to nitpick bugs out of bugtracker for justification
I mean, if they've been regularly hitting said bug, does it matter how obscure it is? If I were using a tool that was broken for me personally, I'd be ditching it, too; with absolutely zero regard to whether the tool works for others.
It is good to have alternatives to mega-corporations controlling the ecosystem.
Microsoft controlling GitHub is an issue, but one can see this issue emerging in different places too; see shopify puting pressure on the ruby ecosystem, ending with various developers who contributed to ruby (in particular via gems and bundler) no longer being accepted there (via RubyCentral's take-over, under shopify's directive and influence onto ruby). Many more examples can be given here. The thing is that money buys influence, ultimately dictating who can contribute and how. Python forcing mandatory 2FA onto all developers is also an example here - the hobbyist who just contributes code, has not really any benefit here, whereas corporations delegate more "security" onto unpaid folks.
Exhibit A is a github user joelreymont who seems to be making a habit of this behavior. He did a very similar spam on ocaml github.com/ocaml/ocaml/pull/14369
Reminds me of Blindsight by Peter Watts. Aliens viewed our radio signals as a type of malware aimed to consume the resources of a recipient for zero payoff and reduced fitness. This is the same.
This is absolutely insane. If you look at joelreymonts recent activity on GitHub, there is what I would consider an bomb of AI slop PRs with thousands and thousands of changes, AI generated summaries/notes, copyright issues, you name it.
People like this are ruining open source for the rest of us, and those poor maintainers really have their work cut out for them sorting through this slop.
What are you going to do? You can't expect some sort of self-censorship based on righteousness and morals. I see joelreymonts as a pioneer planting chestertons fences. LET THE MAN COOK!
I don't particularly like Zig, actually I don't like the language. But I have to admit, it's a bold move, free software projects should be encouraged to do the same.
$200k GH enterprise “relationship with ICE “ ?
I’m sure ICE spends more than $200k at Dunkin’ Donuts are they in a relationship ?
I don't necessarily disagree with these points (especially with Actions being an unstable POS) but it's not very encouraging to see such language from the lead of Zig. I would reconsider future donations to the Zig Foundation if I were donating.
It’s language like this that sours any darling effect and lets you know that the special project you hope would change the world is run by a child.
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Coderberg is nice , but their P80s are terrible. And they are hosted in Germany, which adds a few seconds to every remote command .
I wouldn’t move business critical repos there .
Everyone loses their mind when GitHub goes down once every 2 years . If codeberg provided SLas , they would probably breach them weekly
I wish GH had issues only every 2 years. That’d be amazing! We see issues weekly - if not near daily - at work. Personally I advocate for self-hosted GitLab. I like their pipelines a lot more than GH Actions too.
We do have a on prem GitLab (ultimate) at work and I'm pretty happy with it all in all with around ~100 active daily users.
Privately Forgejo is fullfilling all my needs with very little maintenance work.
Unfortunately, IMO Gitlab is getting enshittified too and adding llm slop features instead of improving the developer experience...
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Every 2 years? More like every 2 days for GitHub Actions or Git operations those days :(
Grass is always greener.
> And they are hosted in Germany, which adds a few seconds to every remote command
Except, you know, if you live in Germany. Heaven forbid we get decent ping once in a while :)
You’re still going to get better p80s from GitHub , across the Atlantic
What are "P80s"? Given the context, I doubt this refers either to screens used in mineral processing or to home-built firearms, which are all that I see in the first couple pages of search results.
They probably mean 80th percentile of the response time distribution? Usually you see this talked about for P95 or P99
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> when GitHub goes down once every 2 years
Uhh ... More like every two weeks there's some kind of incident.
This is a very good move, using more open technology benefits everyone in the long run.
Aside from the bitter words against Github (and I read comments here forgetting about the very real consequences with people lives like collaboration with ICE), using codeberg is using Forgejo : those technology are by us and for us. Unlike Github we can run our own if necessary and all the technology (actions and such) can be improved and be shared between us.
An other benefit of Forgejo/Codeberg is the absence of pushing for paying more, Github is not free and lives of users going to Azure/Gemini or other Mircrosoft services. There are many parts that are made/changed to nudge people into paying more and more and be vendor-locked.
I like my life to have the fewest dark patterns as possible and Coderberg is extremely helpful.
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For a while now I've been dual hosting my projects on both Github and Codeberg and adding a note in the README's [1] explaining the situation. I donate to Codeberg and run my own self-hosted forgejo runners for actions, and maintain much of my testing on both platforms.
I push to Github and then an Action mirrors the code to Codeberg automatically.
I'd fully switch over except practically everybody is on Github and nobody is on Codeberg, and I've had more outages with Codeberg than Github over the past year.
It really feels like there could be some good tooling in this area to make working through multiple Forge's easier and not force things to be centralized so much. Hopefully more projects moving out of Github makes it easier and gets more people contributing elsewhere.
[1] https://codeberg.org/arcuru/eidetica#repository
What do you find lacking in tooling in that regard?
I don't think there is all that much friction in distributing git, it's one of the easiest tools to have multiple remotes on. The auxiliary tooling is all open source too, so not much in the way of hosting your own, or for hosted platforms offering the services.
The social aspect of the hosted platforms is unlikely to ever be distributed because that is basically githubs only differentiation.
I think OP means multiplying n repos by m hosts and you get nXm assets out of sync , and lots of manual labor keeping track
A managed update service could work to replicate and then raise an error during conflicts . Call it “agentic” and you might get $75m
So we’re calling our fellow programmers monkeys and losers now.
Just MSFT employees. Nobody important.
You have a toxic attitude.
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To see this just as a hosting switch misses the bigger picture. This is the logical infrastructure conclusion of Zig's 'Zero Dependency' philosophy.
Zig spent years removing dependencies on the system C compiler (zig cc), removing dependencies on libc, and is currently working to remove the dependency on LLVM (the self-hosted backend).
GitHub was just another dependency.
For a project obsessed with reproducibility and toolchain sovereignty, relying on a single proprietary platform (and its changing ToS/AI policies) was a massive architectural liability. They aren't just moving repos; they are eliminating 'Platform Risk' the same way they eliminated 'Linker Risk'.
This is a valuable take tbh, I missed it.
Zig team ought to probably write about it in that manner.
I haven't really taken a step back to critically think about using GitHub as a platform until now, but I do agree with the points in this article.
While I like the idea of a more distributed repository environment, I will miss the project discoverability, social aspects, and centralization that GitHub offers. It'll probably be awhile before I make a switch, but I will eventually.
Fwiw they're implementing federation, so bring it back some aspects of centralization without centralization
Good to know! Thanks
You don't have to miss any of that.
Most of my commits for the past five or so years are not on GitHub (both in professional and personal contexts), but that does not equal to me not having a GitHub account and occasionally using it to raise issues / submit PRs to someone else's project that happens to be on GitHub.
GitHub is just not my go-to platform anymore.
Looks like advertisement of codeberg - worked, got my account there
The message itself could be a bit nicer however. I agree with what it says but not with how it is written.
In an industry full of people for whom there's little to no expectation that their work will do much more than fluff up a trust fund somewhere and pay their bills, it's refreshing to see someone who both has principles and is willing to act on them.
It's a pity that the GitHub repository is not mirrored, probably making downstreams broken.
Good move anyway.
It forces people to update their fetch URL to the proper authoritative repo, which is a good thing.
It's a simple `git remote set-url` to fix it, unless you are using some github proprietary API which is the kind of vendor lock-in they want to avoid.
I'm not reading this whole thread, but based on the title I figured it kind of boiled down to name calling bullshit by more open source maintainers.
Folks, we have to stop this bullshit. NOBODY is perfect. Not you. Not me. Not anyone. It IS entirely possible that some script thing was written by an intern and it doesn't quite work right. That's possible. Does that make them a shitty intern?
As I've told others, and try to tell others, empathy is super important in the tech field. As a fellow autistic person who used to be this way towards other people, I find it equally as jarring now and completely turns me off to listening to whatever that person has to say when they make posts like this.
Give people some grace, make fixes, move on with your life. That's the beauty of OSS development. Submit some patches, reach out to maintainers, open a dialog, have good conversation. Don't just shit all over someone for the sake of doing so even if they are doing something "stupid".
I promise you we will ALL be better for it.
> Unfortunately, when it sold out to Microsoft, the clock started ticking. “Please just give me 5 years before everything goes to shit,” I thought to myself. And here we are, 7 years later, living on borrowed time.
Man, sometimes I feel like I live on a different planet. I have been using GitHub since 2010 and—while I really wish I had a nicer way of putting this—I cannot remember a time when all of the flagship products were not uniformly either worst-in-class or close to it. Code review/PRs, issues, code search, CI, a real enterprise offering, and now AI features: all of these offerings had gaps serious enough to instigate real, threatening upstarts, and some of those upstarts were themselves big enough to become public companies. Seriously. A viable path to IPO from 2013 to (say) 2019 was literally "make a version of a GitHub feature that simply does not suck."
I loved GitHub in 2010. I also remember those years, 2013 to 2019, being essentially totally lost, with no meaningful product movement at all. Am I truly alone in this? What is this Andrew talking about here?
I'm not going to defend the Microsoft acquisition, but at least—excruciatingly slowly—things like code review and issues are finally starting to receive features. It's crazy to say it out loud but that is what I see.
I just can't help but think the product "enshittification" narrative here is an ex post justification of the author's own feelings.
GitHub is only nice if you’ve used bitbucket after Atlassian bought it.
But that’s very faint praise.
No idea if this is a big thing or not, but people don't like AI. Other than leaders who have been sold a promise, and the people charging for that promise.
Well, GitHub is under AI org now internally at MSFT; on the github front page, they mostly advertise Copilot; I think the ability to host, run and fund code is accidental.
It's not accidental but rather part of their AI training strategy.
Is he turning to be a Linus? I'm worried for Zig.
For those like me who are obviously blind, the new location is at https://codeberg.org/ziglang/zig
Heh, I tried to follow the link to the Codeberg repo at the top of the blog post and it is failing to connect. Maybe HN hug of death? In any case it makes the rest of the post and its criticisms of GitHub hit a little differently.
edit: I say as a GitHub sponsor of Zig for the past few years. I do see that I'll have to move that, and maybe I will, but I don't love having yet another account with saved credit card info and subscription to manage...
I do feel that GitHub's product development has been less exciting in recent years, but that's natural for any maturing platform. While I can't judge whether there are fewer talented people involved, I've noticed they haven't increased mistakes, and the platform continues to grow. It would be unfair to overlook the hard work that goes into maintaining GitHub and shipping new features (even if some of those features aren't to everyone's taste). I'm grateful for GitHub and hope it continues to thrive. Peace.
This is hilarious. Hating Microsoft will never go out of style. Fun to see the youngs rediscover it. Also hilarious is that Codeberg as a frontend is slow as hell; slower than Github even.
Have fun with your newfound virtue, Zig folks!
My least favorite thing about modern philosophy / discourse is how the idea of having virtues is made to seem ridiculous
If voiced and channeled properly, I see very little chance of Microsoft and Github wouldn't prioritize fixes for a critical open source project.
Yes issues have been filed but more could be done back channel.
Personally - I think GitHub is a cultural artifact now. Of the entire planet. Hackers and curious minds from Japan to Alaska and everything in-between flock to GitHub.
As I pointed out in a different comment, even IBM have to maintain a GitHub Actions runner fork with s390x support because upstream just cannot even be bothered to accept the relevant patches: https://github.com/uweigand/runner
If IBM cannot get Microsoft to work with them on something so small but impactful, there's no chance we can.
> Personally - I think GitHub is a cultural artifact now. Of the entire planet. Hackers and curious minds from Japan to Alaska and everything in-between flock to GitHub.
And it's in the hands of a for-profit company pushing LLM nonsense. That should be alarming! Let's instead encourage people to use platforms managed by non-profits.
ITT people defending a megacorp. Oh my...
Came hear and read “GitHub isn’t a good guy anymore” (not the first time, and seems to be increasing in frequency).
It’s like sourceforge all over again. History rhymes with itself, and enshitification has been added to dictionaries for a good reason.
As a once upon a time avid slashdotter, makes me wonder if some day, HN will go the same route.
I don't see this site as being the spiritual successor to /. at all, the audience is much more money focused and much less software focused. I miss /. as a low 5 digit user there.
I certainly think that this site has significant overlap with /., though of course not 100% the same. It feels crazy similar to me in fact, like stepping back in time to when I used to post there.
I am not sure it is like sourceforge. The UI of sourceforge was always bad. Github's UI is quite solid. I actually started to hate gitlab recently because of their UI. I always feel in utter confusion when it comes to gitlab.
Compared to installing Apache, Wiki, Roundup, CVS, and Mailman on your own server, SourceForge's UI was fantastic.
> actually started to hate gitlab recently because of their UI.
Same. UI "improvements" and LLM slop features instead of improving the developer experience
>Let us please consider the GitHub issues that remain open as metaphorically “copy-on-write”. Please leave all your existing GitHub issues and pull requests alone. No need to move your stuff over to Codeberg unless you need to make edits, additional comments, or rebase. We’re still going to look at the already open pull requests and issues; don’t worry.
No way for those to be moved too or not worth the effort? Unless misremembering, another project that moved forges (to GitLab?) had somehow done it.
GitHub's API has extremely aggressive rate limits which make migrating large numbers of existing issues and PRs off of the platform borderline impossible. AIUI, this is why Gitea's main repo is on GitHub: they couldn't figure out a way to cleanly migrate! The tinfoil hat in me absolutely sees this as an attempt at vendor lock-in on GitHub's end.
I'm not sure I'd want something I cared about to depend on a codebase that included anything as amateurish as that "safe_sleep" script mentioned in the post. It's honestly astonishing that it took GitHub as long is it did to fix that bug.
Codeberg repo took only an eternity to load. So much for “snappy”.
Hug of death followed by a DDoS. At the time of me writing this, it loads instantly again.
Seems to be HackerNews effect. It's typically instant
I'm not a fan of GitHub Actions either, but is there actually anything better nowadays? I've just come to accept it as the best of bad options.
Forgejo Actions is what Zig has migrated to. It's very similar to GitHub Actions; the downside of that is that you inherit questionable design choices, but the big upside is that migration is super easy. While they don't target 1:1 compatibility, things are similar enough that you basically only need to tweak workflow files very slightly. Our experience so far is that it fixes most of our serious problems with GitHub Actions; in particular, their runner software is significantly easier to deploy and configure, has much better target support (GitHub's runner is essentially impossible to use outside of x86_64/aarch64 linux/windows/macos; we tried to patch it to support riscv64-linux and got stuck on some nonsensical problems on GitHub's side!), and actually accepts contributions & responds to issues. My issues with the GitHub Actions' backend & web interface (of which I have many) are pretty much all gone, too, with no new issues taking their place.
I don't like Azure DevOps or it's pipelines (the yaml ones, not the classic drag and drop that is now disabled by default), but I like it a lot more than github actions. I doubt we'd ever really use github actions for security reasons, but I do prefer the explicit behaviors and templating with structure with azure compared to how Github Actions tries to solve change management with digitalisation. I can totally see why github actions would make more sense if you don't have enterprise organisation type AD/Entra + Azure though.
Gitlab CI is leagues better
I for one am thankful for GitHub Actions, having free access to stateless automation and deployment scripts that's versioned along with code, running on Servers I don't have to manage has been a gift.
I don't miss anything from the dark days of managing self-hosted CI servers.
This post is gross and makes me think a lot less of Zig. Calling people losers and monkeys is unprofessional and unnecessary.
What's the main diff between the different repos? I would think whoever keeps the repo free of malicious code is the best. A big player like GH should have an advantage on that. Also not intentional malicious code uploads, but vulnerable code should be detected and reported to tyhe submitters.
Wow. I think that's a serious mistake. Maybe GitHub is no longer so great and snappy but nowhere to justify moving something that needs: 1. Money, 2. Exposition, to something obscure just because it's a bit better. It's Git with an UI anyway, there isn't such large difference. I don't care about the fact the post is harsh: it's the content that it is broken from my POV because. It is absolutely legit to do something like that, in theory, but when you are handling a project that - at this point - is also the chosen language of a non trivial amount of folks, you need to act not just following what you like, but what is better for the project in the long time, and it is very hard to see how going away from GitHub (the fucking big market of open source software in the main city plaza -- let's use the same post tones) is better for Zig. What I think it is better is, of course, not absolutely better, but let's zoom on this issue root cause. It is the classical developer intolerance for tool that are not "as they wish/think", which is very common among technical people, but is a POV, I mean this "tool oriented" workflow, where this little feature/customization matters so much in your life (instead of adapting a bit and do not care), that I believe is a problem in our industry, and also has effects on the design philosophy of many programmers, that are too details oriented. Coders spend the majority of their life in the terminal, not on in GitHub. To check issues / PR there is not this Stranger Things Upside Down nightmare.
Another problem with that is that you know what you are leaving, but you don't really know what you find in the new place. GitHub used to go down often in the early days. Now they may not be snappy and unfortunately like 99% of the web felt for this Javascript framework craziness. But the site is always up, I bet has disaster recovery and serious backup policy, and so forth. Can you find this so obviously in other smaller places?
GitHub Actions are seriously broken and that alone is a technically sound enough reason to move: the sleep.sh bullshit has degraded the performance of our CI for a long time, as it regularly livelocks in an endless while(true) spin runner agents, who stop processing new jobs. The agent itself has poor platform support also because it has a runtime dependency on .NET, and lately GH Actions started running jobs out of order with the result that old jobs would starve and time out, causing PRs to turn up red for no real reason.
It's a real problem to run a project like Zig if your CI doesn't work. I guess we could have paid for an external CI service, but that as well would depend on GitHub APIs, so we would have gained what, a couple years? Given the current trajectory of GitHub I wouldn't trust them to maintain those APIs correctly for any longer than that (and as far as I know the current vibe-scheduling issues might already be reflected in the APIs that third party CI providers would use).
Let's not forget that "GitHub is an AI company now".
As a side note, people said that not posting anymore on Twitter and leaving Reddit was also a death sentence for Zig. Time has passed and we're still alive so far, while in the meantime both platforms have started their final journey towards the promised lands of the elves.
They won't get there tomorrow or the next month, but I'm sure there has been a time where people started moving from Sourceforge to GitHub and somebody else remarked that they were doing something needlessly risky.
As far as we can tell Codeberg is a serious attempt at a non-profit code sharing platform and we feel optimistic enough about its future that we're willing to bet on it.
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I had to scroll too far for someone to mention third-party CI. GitHub Actions free runners have always sucked, but the third-party runner ecosystem is really strong for those who can afford it. imo the APIs are far better than the rest of the product - I suspect enterprise customers are strong-arming GitHub to keep them reliable. and there's always third-party CI like tekton if Actions' yaml is too annoying
Speaking as the creator of one of the largest Zig projects, I agree with antirez
As the creator of one of the larger Zig projects, does this announcement undermine your confidence in Zig at all? Either with the language used or the decision in itself?
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I was happy from the sideline seeing the recent big Zig donations. But this sudden decision is a shock. Technical issues can be worked around (I wish/think), but leaving such a dominant platform? I don't know. For my small small needs Forgejo works great, but for Zig, a project which I hope has a lot of mainstream success, I'm not convinced, that Forgejo/Codeberg is the best fit (atm). Even Graphene OS which has very high standards is (still) on Github, maybe Zig could brood (brüten) a bit longer to decide if it is really time to leave?
Also Julia, https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia
And https://github.com/ZigEmbeddedGroup/microzig or e.g. https://github.com/haydenridd/silvia-pid-board
Moving away from Github may end up killing the project.
Your making Zig look like a joke. Im gonna go back to C.
I'm very happy with this and hope it's part of a larger trend to move software away from Big Co. I'll have to move my projects off GitHub too, so I'm not a hypocrite :)
I sent a pull request to an open source project and GitHub added Copilot to review it, saying I invited it to review, embarrassing me. It then spit out some nonsense. Turns out this is controlled by a switch somewhere, which was enabled.
I like Copilot in VSCode, but this is BS.
> remaining losers > created by monkeys
That just shows what kind of person they are, and makes me never want to use Zig, even hope for its failure.
Hopefully more projects can follow! Codeberg has a far more secure foundation to avoid unethical practices on users.
Its sad to see people silently supporting Github monopoly. Any migration out of github should be encouraged. Decentalized, open-source systems should always be preferred over corporate walled gardens. Trusting Microsoft never ends well. The amount of infrastructure/projects/etc that stop with github malfunctions and have no fallback or operating mirror git is astounding. Github is eventually going to be enshittified and abandoned, so its fairly wise to spread projects into multiple(not just codeberg) synced mirrors where any server failing doesn't stop progress.
Another software project feels it’s necessary to dive into divisive politics when it should just make good software. It’s sad, really. Now what I think of when I hear „Zig“ is a community of self-important, immature and delusional people instead of thinking about the undeniable advantages of the Zig language.
Also take a look at sourcehut for those interested in an alternative
That was quite the insufferable egotistical virtue signaling nonsense.
Do they actually think the folks who run Github are in charge or making typescript?
Hey not everything Microsoft makes turns into shit like Windows. Github is king. Your politics will age like $5 wine.
You own the code, you decide where you want to host it. If anyone knows, I'm looking for copyrighted code to deploy my own cloned service to make some money, DM.
Translation ?
I think it would make more sense in a pure AI-topic, but the fact that you can scrape copyrighted content and create services (AI companies) is the original idea behind my comment. I'm not sure to what extent CoPilot was trained on private repositories or other possibly copyrighted code. But if it was e.g, I'm supporting their (Zig's) cause.
hn post = verify if you scale codeberg doesnt
Codeberg has a yearly fee via euro payment method or manual wire transfer. Membership requires manual approval.
Edit: you can register without membership.
This is extremely misleading. "Membership" is about direct contribution to and influence over the non-profit; it'd be somewhat analagous to being a GitHub shareholder. The very first question on Codeberg's FAQ [0] makes this abundantly clear, as does the "Join" page [1]. I don't see any part of the website you could go to to get any other impression.
[0]: https://docs.codeberg.org/getting-started/faq/#what-do-i-nee...
[1]: https://join.codeberg.org/
Good, rejecting reliance on Microsoft's centralized platform means less vulnerability to their evil policy/practices (AI, users/country bans, privacy, vendor-locking)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45679837
Congratulations on the move!
> Thank you to the Forgejo contributors who helped us with our issues switching to the platform, as well as the Codeberg folks who worked with us on the migration
I'd love to see a writeup about these problems/solutions at some point.
Although it's not a writeup, most of the problems can be traced through this "moving-to-forgejo" meta-issue: https://codeberg.org/forgejo-contrib/moving-to-forgejo/issue...
Nice work
i was drunk and at a bar.. zig and nim got up to do karaoke together.. elm was there... anyway, they started singing.. 'weeee are the champions, my friends..' it was fun. i got up. 'no time for looooosers, cos we are the champions..' so fun. we had these awesome, delicious cocktails.. they had strawberry in them (with 3 r's) and guido made a toast. he said he couldn't sing but wrote down my name for a song. 'abracadabra'. heh, i want to reach out and grab ya! i nailed it, then did another queen song. eventually we went out back and smoked a joint, but we were so drunk, it knocked us out.
Consequent move.
Very good move, codeberg is noscript/basic (x)html friendly, which microsoft github is no more. Unfortunately, zig is in bad shape since microsoft rust is pushed hard everywhere in spite of zig.
> Very good move, codeberg is noscript/basic (x)html friendly
No, they use the Anubis malware.
Last time I did check codeberg, they were very careful at being noscript/basic (x)html browser friendly.
Weird. Need to double check I guess.
I am by no means an Ai fanboy, but not using translation tools feels odd?
I thought the same but from another perspective, it's better to explain things in a language you dominate and let others translate it to theirs, which might be a good or bad translation; than translate it yourself to a language you don't dominate and the others always get a bad translation. At least in the first case new people can come with better translations.
This is all assuming translation tools always translate things wrong, which they do when it comes to programming terms.
One doesn't exclude the other. You can use machine translation and clearly marking it as such, and then let people override them if there is the necessary contribution activity.
I tend to avoid projects that take tech decisions based on activism. It never signals a quality product.
All of gnu was a technical decision based on activism. Ignorance of this signals something as well.
Well, integrations are also important. Currently everything works first with Github (Codex, Claude Code, Linear, etc. etc.) so it's just easier. There's also Gitlab for people who don't like Github. Personally for what I do, Github does its job well, and the free private repos are great.
> it’s abundantly clear that the talented folks who used to work on the product have moved on to bigger and better things, with the remaining losers eager to inflict some kind of bloated, buggy JavaScript framework on us in the name of progress.
> More importantly, Actions is created by monkeys
This writing really does not reflect well on Zig. If you have technical issues with Github, fine: cite them. But leave ad hominems like "losers" and "monkeys" out of it.
Amusingly, this post violates Zig's own code of conduct: https://ziglang.org/code-of-conduct
> Examples of behavior that contribute to creating a positive environment include:
> - Using welcoming and inclusive language.
> - Being respectful of differing viewpoints and experiences.
> - Showing empathy towards others.
> - Showing appreciation for others’ work.
Codes of conduct are perfunctory virtue signalling. Do we really need a unique set of "rules" posted on every project? They all sound like they were written by the same AI bot. That said, it's telling that the Zig leader can't even follow them. The rules should just be taken down.
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There is a difference between what you say to and about volunteers working for free on their hobby and what you say about the work of a company famously known as "The Death Star"
You want to work with people and the group says "yay and this is how we will work together" you do that or go away. This is entirely separate to stating a universal truth such as "Microsoft product blows because they do not care", "Oracle sucks" or famously "You can't anthropomorphise Larry Ellison"
Did Linus ever blow-torch community volunteers or did he get the pip purely with big corp submitting paid trash for their own purposes? He seems to cop a fair bit himself from people saying thou shalt not...
The standards differ. Microsoft is going to be ok guys.
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> Amusingly, this post violates Zig's own code of conduct: https://ziglang.org/code-of-conduct
Not sure it does. Right there in the same link you posted:
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coc says this:
> This document contains the rules that govern these spaces only:
> The ziglang organization on Codeberg
> #zig IRC channel on Libera.chat
> Zig project development Zulip chat
doesnt seem to include the zig page!!
so no, it does not violate CoC
Honestly, I don't see where it violates that code of conduct.
Luckily, no one cares about my (or your) opinions on that matter because, as far as I can tell, neither of us have contributed anything to Zig.
[flagged]
> created by monkeys
I don't particularly care for either Zig or Github, but...
they do precisely cite the technical issues. That snippet links to a Github discussion comment https://github.com/actions/runner/issues/3792#issuecomment-3...
(reproduced below)
"The bug in this "safe sleep" script is obvious from looking at it: if the process is not scheduled for the one-second interval in which the loop would return (due to $SECONDS having the correct value), then it simply spins forever. That can easily happen on a CI machine under extreme load. When this happens, it's pretty bad: it completely breaks a runner until manual intervention. On Zig's CI runner machines, we observed multiple of these processes which had been running for hundreds of hours, silently taking down two runner services for weeks."
"I don't understand how we got here. Even ignoring the pretty clear bug, what makes this Bash script "safer" than calling into the POSIX standard sleep utility? It doesn't seem to solve any problem; meanwhile, it's less portable and needlessly eats CPU time by busy-waiting."
"The sloppy coding which is evident here, as well as the inaction on core Actions bugs (in line with the decay in quality of almost every part of GitHub's product), is forcing the Zig project to strongly consider moving away from GitHub Actions entirely. With this bug, and many others (severe workflow scheduling issues resulting in dozens of timeouts; logs randomly becoming inaccessible; random job cancellations without details; perpetually "pending" jobs), we can no longer trust that Actions can be used to implement reliable CI infrastructure. I personally would seriously encourage other projects, particularly any using self-hosted runners, to look carefully at the stability of Actions and ask themselves whether it is a solution worth sticking with long-term when compared with alternatives."
----
I agree that the writing in the blog post is more colorful than precise, but sanitizing every bit of expression dulls the internet. Humans invented language for a reason.
Then blast the product, not the people who built it.
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I must be missing something huge here, or maybe it's the wine -- how is the code in PR 3157 (referenced in a later comment) a proper fix?
https://github.com/actions/runner/pull/3157/files
Is : doing something unusual in GH actions?
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> I agree that the writing in the blog post is more colorful than precise, but sanitizing every bit of expression dulls the internet. Humans invented language for a reason.
Where do you draw the line, then? Is a racist screed acceptable to you as long as the following paragraph references technical issues correctly?
The language in the blog post is insulting. Imagine how you would feel if you were the person who wrote this code, and now you are being called a monkey in front of thousands of people on the internet. Certainly you've made mistakes in your code before...or are you saying you've always written flawless code without errors?
These codes of conduct always seemed a bit superfluous to me, but after reading comments like these I can totally see why they are necessary.
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> But leave ad hominems like "losers" and "monkeys" out of it.
Ad hominem happens when someone undermines the argument based on the speaker's background. Here they are not undermining any argument. They're just name calling. This is name calling, not ad hominem.
Yeah this is pretty embarrassing.
I get frustrated with tech all the time! I get it. Grr when Actions feels so irritatingly misbehaved…
But how you handle or fail to handle your frustration demonstrates the competence of your character and speaks volumes of what you’d be like to work with.
Also important to note that this post was authored by the original author of zig, who presumably effectively controls the project.
You would be happier working in a kindergarten. I truly mean that. Think about it. Not trying to be rude.
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It's okay to bring some "natural" language in technical communication. It feels more humane. All the whitewashed corporate language, riddled marketing bullshit feels so soul dead.
You can express dissatisfaction and anger „naturally“ without calling people losers and monkeys.
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If he had gone on a rant purely about the product - eg “GitHub actions is a garbage product that never works”, I think that wouldn’t have left such a bad taste in my mouth. Calling the developers all “losers” crosses a line.
that's all well and good but not when it is peddled by you simultaneously in other facets: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46065778
Sure. If you feel the need to write "this is shitty code", fair enough, I'm fine with making allowances for that kind of language. But please leave it at that, instead of also insulting the people who wrote it. There are, unfortunately, plenty of ways for bad incentives to result in competent people creating bad products.
But not when it's against coc
As a corporate drone it's refreshing. Already planning to dedicate some of the holiday season to learning Zig and this latest move only makes it more enticing.
And if he cleaned it up, an even larger number of people would be calling it written with AI.
Shrug.
If he were berating a specific person, I might flag it. Berating Github and Microsoft as an organization? Nah.
Given that CEOs seem to now live in a Post Shame Reality(tm), I'll allow bringing some shame to the situation.
Well at least he's being a jerk on his own blog here, so it's easy to ignore. I've seen instances of him unreasonably lashing out without the decency of understanding others' writings first on third party properties. A quick search turned up https://discourse.llvm.org/t/rfc-libc-taking-a-dependency-on... can't remember the details of other instances.
Nothing to see there, sorry.
I agree that he came out blasting, and the language and tone, particularly at the beginning are pretty off-putting. That being said, having read the full post, I can't say I disagree with the motives and point of view.
I have not finished the post because of the tone at the beginning.
IT at higher ranks is about people. This post disqualifies Zig as an org.
He probably read too many Linux kernel mailinglist posts recently.
But I agree on the Devon Zuegel praise. Most of the good devs and managers are gone. Only brian for the git SHA-256 migration is still there I think, though he got no time finishing it.
Seems like Andrew realize how insane it was name calling fellow software engineers and updated his post to not call Github engineers "monkeys" anymore. Still a shame he did it initially, and that he didn't apologize for it, but removing that is better than nothing.
As a former JavaScript developer and current JavaScript hobbyist I see why this article’s language is deeply offensive. Most employed JavaScript developers absolutely suck at what they do and are highly sensitive about it. Everything other than praise is offensive. The surest indication of maturity is abandoning politeness in favor of evidence, empathy, or stronger arguments.
On the other hand Zig is often regarded as the fastest executing modern programming language. They have earned the ability to complain about performance like no one else. The article cites precise issues they have with GitHub.
Furthermore JavaScript, when not written by monkeys, is extremely fast which further qualifies their complaint. For example I have a large SPA that loads in the browser from across a network in around 0.065 seconds and achieves full rendering and state restoration in about 0.135 seconds. If I drop the largest one feature from that SPA I can get full rendering and state restoration in about 0.08 seconds. Your typical JavaScript developer, on the other hand, struggles to copy/paste code into a JSX template someone else defined with no idea how to measure performance. To me that’s what’s offensive.
I much prefer the authors of anything on the internet be honest about what they think instead of self-censoring their language. I really thought we all agreed on disliking Newspeak ?
You're right, I've been hearing lots of good things about Zig and I wanted to check it out but I'm glad I saw this post. I want no part of this thing.
I've heard people call other people "monkeys" before in a work setting. it's never good. Fact is, you don't need to call anyone names or insult them.
The takeaway for me is that the Zig project is led by people who are extremely immature and toxic. I simply don't trust any decision these people make. If you can't bring yourself to respectfully disagree with other human beings, if you resort to calling names and insults targetted at developers because of bugs, then i don't trust you to not backdoor your own code, or do something harmful to those who rely on your work because of some drama, spat or activism.
Even if actual political activists did this it would be unacceptable. If you called Netanyahu a monkey because of his Gaza genocide, most people who are pro-palestine will try to cancel you! Not because they think highly of him, but because it hurts the cause more than it helps.
Andrew: It seems you don't respect your own self or your community enough to set an example of decorum and civility. You've made Zig a platform for your own personal shitposting. Please do better!
> The takeaway for me is that the Zig project is led by people who are extremely immature and toxic.
immature and toxic : welcome to every big tech , you don't want part of them either, right ?
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Based on this rationale nobody should use Linux either =))
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>If you called Netanyahu a monkey because of his Gaza genocide, most people who are pro-palestine will try to cancel you! Not because they think highly of him, but because it hurts the cause more than it helps.
Your reading of the current political climate is very different to mine.
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> I simply don't trust any decision these people make
Do you have an example or two of poor decisions that push you away so strongly?
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> I've heard people call other people "monkeys" before in a work setting. it's never good.
Is this blog post in a work setting? Oh my. You should probably run to HR and report unprofessional behavior!
Oh wait.
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microsoft employee detected. lol to all ms employees, keep downvoting...
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> Stuff that used to be snappy is now sluggish and often entirely broken.
and as of when was GitHub known for its snappiness?
GitHub was very snappy in the early days. I remember how refreshing I found GitHub when it was new. I don't know when but sometime after 2020 it has just been going downhill.
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Look at the issue linked. While I don't think that language is preferable, at some point we need to call out terrible and lazy code.
For those who haven't seen the actual issue that links to, I'd take a closer look. Pretty insane: https://github.com/actions/runner/issues/3792#issuecomment-3...
Yeah, calling the authors of this code losers and monkeys is being kind. There is zero excuse for ever writing code like this, the incompetence is staggering.
This writing made me curious enough to click the provided citation though, and I'd have to say "monkeys" is really being kind if we take into account the combination of code quality issues, lack of surrounding process, and _what_ these code quality issues are affecting (the criticalness of the path).
God this entire thread is just people defending him as “a breath of fresh air” and “just using human language”. There is something in people that makes them enjoy seeing others belittled like this. A complete lack of empathy, because no one would like to be treated this way themselves, but are perfectly happy seeing others treated this way. One commenter justifies it by saying “if I’m fucking up, it’s ok to speak to me this way”. Sure guy, we believe you.
This reminds me of when Linus Torvalds would lose his shit now and then and launch gratuitous personal attacks at people who had made mistakes. Comment sections would be filled with folks laughing at Linus’ latest victim. “Couldn’t be me, I would never make this mistake”. Even Linus admits he was wrong to treat people this way and he’s taken time off to work on himself and become a better person. But there is still no shortage of people who enjoy seeing pain inflicted on others, nor people larping as a younger Linus.
Many people are tired of the toxic positivity common in corporate speak, which lets poor performers off the hook, and prevents high-quality talent from speaking freely.
"A complete lack of empathy" is a bit of a stretch, no? Calling someone a monkey is fairly lighthearted, while getting the point across that maybe they should take stock of the awareness of their abilities.
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> One commenter justifies it by saying “if I’m fucking up, it’s ok to speak to me this way”. Sure guy, we believe you.
Did you read the issue at hand?
This is not average people making "mistakes". This is severe incompetence at every layer of decision making, and a complete lack of care for quality work. If you want to be mad at someone for being unfair, be mad at the manager of these people for putting them in a position they are grossly unprepared for.
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> A complete lack of empathy...
...for one of the largest of most toxic IT companies in the history if IT?
Spare me, please. Microsoft is the last legal entity in the universe you should feel empathy for.
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> no one would like to be treated this way themselves
I'd like to be treated this way if I am doing really stupid things. If I am doing the kind of stupid things GitHub is doing, I'd rather someone call me out as a monkey so that I know I f-ed up.
I know calling "monkey" is not professional but my expectation of professional treatment stops at my office with my colleagues and at a few other places. I don't expect the whole world to be professional to me. I can take some bloke on the internet calling me a monkey if that helps me to introspect and make things right.
If they're nice about it and choose professional words to tell me I'm being stupid, that's great. But if they cannot and they call me "monkey", I'll take that too. I'd rather have the feedback in whatever words they can muster than not have the feedback at all.
i think the word "losers" was replaced by "rookies"
Quite on-brand of Zig, though.
Eh I thought it was on point. The github CEO talking about adopt ai or get out uses no curse words or direct insults, but i found it far more threatening and distasteful.
Hackernews seems to consistently believe that you can be terrible as long as you're polite.
Yea... Nail in the coffin on them for me.
Well said. It's not good to see such arguments like these.
Oh no! Anyways... I love zig and I'm glad they're moving off what GitHub has become, not least because enough high profile projects leaving might make them focus on what matters again.
Agreed. Came here to point out that the lack of professionalism and common courtesy here is reminiscent of the dark entitled days of open source in the late 90s that had attitude of "We build free software so we can tell you to go fuck yourself.". Hope we're not headed back there.
I’ll take that vs no open source software contributors.
Elitism is far from the worst character trait unpaid code janitors can be expected to have.
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As opposed to the modern era of megacorps benefitting from the free labor of OS maintainers? I will not deny that corporate contributions to open source projects are significant, but there are definitely some very visible examples of projects being taken advantage of by companies that want to use free software without giving back.
“We build free software so we can tell you to go fuck yourself.”
Sounds like a great thing compared to the sanitized corpo bullshit from nowadays. Microsoft bought themselves into OSS with github and each project has a bland CoC.
It’s pathetic. Even the github monkeys know deep down that this is wrong.
But he is right
And insulting publicly developers like that isn't ok.
Kicking up is very different from kicking down. Zig is not kicking down here.
> eager to inflict some kind of bloated, buggy JavaScript framework on us in the name of progress
Could someone elaborate what that JS framework is? Is this recent?
I think GitHub was built on Rails, and the UI has changed relatively little in the past few years.
Came here to say that. Killed my curiosity towards Zig in an instant. What a disrespect.
A pity. Saw Zig as something rising but with this kind of toxicity, no thanks.
>A pity. Saw Zig as something rising but with this kind of toxicity, no thanks.
Don't get me wrong, it is a bit toxic. However, I feel like taking one comment in a larger article and blowing it up out of proportion is just as toxic.
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It's probably a lapse, don't read into it too much. You can't expect people to tip toe around. Just give him feedback.
Monkeys, LLMs, coding agents, AI - are all synonyms for me. Not to be confused with actual living things.
The unfortunate truth is that this is where we are as a society. It doesn't reflect poorly on them. It reflects well. They're straightshooters. Theyre not afraid to speak candidly (your definition of candid may differ). They inject humor. You may not like it personally, but it doesn't reflects poorly even if it should.
We're at the tail end of a long decline.
Calling people monkeys and losers doesn't particularly tickle my sense of humor. If anything, it reminds me of Linus Torvalds from his toxic ages. Fortunately, he has matured well. Andrew seems like a smart guy, I hope that he will have the emotional maturity to realize that you can be no-bullshit and straight to the point without the need to call people names.
pretty sure there was no humor there, just looks poorly upon the author
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He shot the wrong entity.
It means to be snidely controversial.
> Putting aside GitHub’s relationship with ICE…
If you actual actually wanted to put that aside, you could have…put it aside.
(Plus it being weird on a substantive basis. Selectively blacklisting specific government agencies…that’s just not a sustainable approach.)
What's unsustainable about it?
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I thought people knew andrewk was an ahole? I thought that was his supposed charm? Like Linus.
I mean https://github.com/ziglang/zig/pull/24317 wasn't that long ago.
What's wrong with that pull request?
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It doesn't reflect well, but also, is it not fairly par for the course from a BDFL type? Surely Linus Torvalds has said meaner things at some point on a listserv. Why does this guy get blasted for it? Because people still have generally positive sentiment towards Github? Just a day or 2 ago some other article was making similarly "ad hominem" attacks towards anonymous Youtube PMs, it got tons of upvotes and nobody clutched their pearls for the poor PMs. The Github/MS engineers who maintain actions (whose poor performance probably isn't even the result of any single individuals bad code), will be fine.
Seems like the HN mob is just as capricious as the author in deciding who gets as pass or not.
> Surely Linus Torvalds has said meaner things at some point on a listserv.
It boggles the mind why people keep using Linus as an excuse to justify rudeness. Linus apologised, he recognised what he did for years was not OK, and took time off to reflect and become a better person.
> Seems like the HN mob is just as capricious as the author in deciding who gets as pass or not.
Are all the people who commented in that submission commenting on this one? No? Then it’s not the same group of people, and opinions are different. There’s no “mob”, HN isn’t a hive mind. If it were, you’d be part of it and agree.
Nah, fuck 'em. Call out corpo bullshit where you see it. Github is just LinkedIn for people with compsci degrees now.
And what's wrong with that? Even if you're right, just don't use it, why insult and denigrate people?
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I agree that the article is strongly worded, and Andrew seems quite angry/frustrated. However, it also gives me flashbacks of how it was back in the golden days, when Linus was calling wannabe kernel contributors idiots who should have died because they "couldn't find their mothers tit to suck on".
Having low patience is a quirk of our nerd culture, and now that the woke season has ended, it seems to be going back to how it has always been!
While I generally think constructive criticism is usually the right choice, I suspect Github will never get the message unless there are some very strongly worded criticisms. In Andrew's defense, he did post some constructive evidence of things he considered problematic.
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Treating people poorly isn’t a quirk of nerd culture. Even Linus doesn’t think so.
> This is my reality. I am not an emotionally empathetic kind of person and that probably doesn't come as a big surprise to anybody. Least of all me. The fact that I then misread people and don't realize (for years) how badly I've judged a situation and contributed to an unprofessional environment is not good.
> This week people in our community confronted me about my lifetime of not understanding emotions. My flippant attacks in emails have been both unprofessional and uncalled for.
> Especially at times when I made it personal. In my quest for a better patch, this made sense to me. I know now this was not OK and I am truly sorry. The above is basically a long-winded way to get to the somewhat painful personal admission that hey, I need to change some of my behavior, and I want to apologize to the people that my personal behavior hurt and possibly drove away from kernel development entirely.
> I am going to take time off and get some assistance on how to understand people's emotions and respond appropriately.
And he walked the walk. He became better after that. Linux is a better project for it. But I suppose it did influence a generation of people in software who looked up to Linus and thought this is the correct way to treat people you perceive as beneath you.
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The "monkeys" here are clearly refering to those kinds with typewriters.
Evidently not "clearly", given the number of people who didn't see it, but that was my first interpretation as well: I took it as an "infinite monkeys" reference that, in context, was probably standing in for "some un-tested gen AI output". Which, clicking on the link, seems to be what happened?
Anyway, yes, "infinite monkeys on typewriters" seemed to be the relevant meaning of "monkeys" here.
vs…?
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We're past the point of civility when it comes to things like github and M$0FT's involvement.
Thankfully, many of us are not in that "We" group you're referring. This is a toxic culture I want no part of. It says a lot about the nature of the Zig community.
> bloated, buggy JavaScript framework
Isn't that the unfortunate status quo? At least hard requirement for JS, that is.
Google's homepage started requiring this recently. Linux kernel's git, openwrt, esp32.com, and many many others now require it too, via dreaded "Making sure you're not a bot" thing:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44962529
If anything, github is (thankfully) behind the curve here - at least some basics do work without JS.
yeah dunno why anyone would willingly use a msoft product if there was a viable alternative (i say from my windows machine doh, its for games, really!)
> i say from my windows machine doh, its for games, really!
Games run really well on Linux nowadays too :P
what's wrong with ICE
> Effective immediately, I have made ziglang/zig on GitHub read-only, and the canonical origin/master branch of the main Zig project repository is https://codeberg.org/ziglang/zig.git.
If there is one benefit in moving from GitHub it is certainly avoiding receiving AI slop issues on GitHub.
Github was on the decline anyway in the past 5 years, it's time for an alternative and we'll see. Would rather it being Codeberg over something like Sourcehut.
Where do you see sourcehut falling short?
> Github was on the decline anyway in the past 5 years, it's time for an alternative and we'll see.
I tend to agree. But I don't see how an exact UI replica of Github is innovative.
I've only glanced at it though, maybe there's more features underneath the hood.
Happy to learn more about what makes it better. Is the CI system more refined than Github Actions? I was definitely never a fan of that system.
This is one more reason to use Zig.
Looking at these comments, it's painfully apparent how many think that being polite in your communication is more important than actually doing something.
I agree it would have been nicer if the message was more polite. But if you compare that to having the backbone follow through with meaningful long-term changes against a corporation you don't trust or respect, there shouldn't even be a discussion.
And don't even get me started with the people who come in here just to point out that Codeberg isn't perfect either.
> I agree it would have been nicer if the message was more polite. But if you compare that to having the backbone follow through with meaningful long-term changes against a corporation you don't trust or respect, there shouldn't even be a discussion.
You’re framing it as either/or when it isn’t. You can push for real change and communicate like an adult. The two aren’t in conflict; often they reinforce each other.
> The two aren’t in conflict; often they reinforce each other
I’d think they _are_ inherently in conflict. Every person has 24 hours per day, and they can spend them on researching and doing what’s right or on reaching consensus. There is some mutual reinforcement to some extent (as it’s usually right to have a reasonable consensus on what’s the right choice), but beyond some basic level there’s always tradeoff.
And for programming language designers, I really appreciate when they make the right long-term choices even if I don’t understand initially why they were made.
> it's painfully apparent how many think that being polite in your communication is more important than actually doing something
So you want people to talk about actions, not manners. Great.
> And don't even get me started with the people who come in here just to point out that Codeberg isn't perfect either.
Except actions they did with Codeberg...?
Sharing their experience about Codeberg isn't off-topic in a thread about a major repo migrating to Codeberg.
The fetish for "manners" has stood in the way of every single positive societal change. It's exactly what MLK meant with the white moderate favoring a negative peace over positive change:
the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"
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Just the fact of someone migrating a project to another platform during the last week of November suggests that last straws were involved. That’s more of a January or a June thing than November/December.
Fury can be a powerful motivator to commit to doing something you’ve been putting off. It also means your community announcement is going to be pretty spicy, unless you let someone else write it.
> it's painfully apparent how many think that being polite in your communication is more important than actually doing something.
The zig maintainers think that, too, thus the presence of a Code of Conduct on their website. But, as always, it's a "rules for thee, but not for me" situation - if the author was called a "monkey" by someone else, I can guarantee he would invoke the CoC to call them out, but when he does it, it's fine.
> it's painfully apparent how many think that being polite in your communication is more important than actually doing something
I absolutely agree, but people in charge of large projects/groups, in any context, should know better than to put their personal feelings and opinion on topics into the "corporate" messages they are putting out. I am guilty of this myself, no one is holier than thou, but still. AK should know better.
Nobody thinks that. They just don't think that "doing something" gives you an excuse to be an arsehole. Especially if you are hypocritically violating your own CoC.
Yes, it does. Given the choice of having a coworker that's a very nice 0.1x engineer and having a bloody annoying one that's a 10x I'll work with the 10x any day.
The internet has evolved such a Newspeak, censor-driven culture, it's sad to see. I want people to be able to tell each other "I think this is shit and here's why".
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Politeness is free and easy, it's not a big ask and it's certainly not an either-or.
I wouldn't even call it politeness, it's more like basic human decency. Would Andrew Kelly appreciate it if the LLVM guys publicly wrote a blog post calling the Zig maintainers losers and monkeys? Just screams of immaturity, which isn't surprising seeing their political views.
This. The round & slimy language is what big corps do. I don't like how this post is written – but what really matters here is that they are doing a good job moving away from GitHub. I hope more OSS does this.
Despite what majority are defending here, I love how Zig phrased out their blog. We're not in fake enterprise, where HR is guiding your language, calling you family and then fire you whenever convenient to them.
This language by Andrew is natural, real and should be valued more than anything else. Thank you, it's a refresher and it reminds me an old internet, where everyone been really free to write what and how they wanted it to be.
Who are you after all to judge how he writes his opinions?
Happy hacking, Andrew!
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Did you even read the article. Yes, he had 1 sentence on ICE, which maybe you disagree with its politics. But most of the article was with technical issues in github as a platform and its neglect of non AI features. Please take your low quality comment to X.
Finally, I can’t believe I have to say it, but a creator of an open source project is free to infuse it with whatever values he wants, no one hates on SQLite, no need to hate someone for adding his brand of politics / values to his passion project. Please go create your own “non woke” language if you hate it so much.
Github is by far the more woke platform, so I think you missed the point.
There is no sense in which a platform owned by a company which enthusiastically aided a genocide could be termed "woke."
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Thanks for chiming in, ChatGPT.
It's so absurdly GPT-coded I have to think it's satirical.
I guess people think being a jerk is a signal that they are not a LLM bot.
sounds about right to me. fuck github. if github can do whatever they want in the name of progress then surely they'd survive being called a monkey. anything with microsoft's name on it was designed by a drug-addled albatross.
instead of crying about zig's coc they should work on that abomination of a framework.
I thought those of you who said he was being offensive were more or less justified in saying it here. Then I read the post. Literally nothing offensive. Calling someone a code-monkey has been around for as long as I can remember. If throughout your career you haven't questioned yourself "am I a code monkey?" at least once you're either incredibly smart or incredibly stupid.
I can't agree with him more that Github went to absolute shit and I can feel React crap emanating from it without even looking at the code. There's everything in the world wrong with React and I would easily call anyone advocating it a code-monkey in their face. It's not about JavaScript itself - it's about the framework ideas, which are absolute trash. If anyone's offended by a code-monkey, I feel like maybe they should be.
Biting the hand that fed you. I hope he's going to donate some of the money is getting begging to codeberg in return of their services.
you say this like it's some own or something, but I'd be more surprised if they didn't. believe it or not, they are already donating some of their funds to the upstream ecosystem[0].
[0]: https://ziglang.org/news/2025-financials/