Comment by j-pb
1 day ago
On one hand I kinda feel validated for having jumped ship on Zig 3+ Years ago[1] and moving everything to Rust[2], with the language simply being too unstable and unsafe in my eyes, despite my love for comptime and people arguing that Bun and Tigerbeetle were proof that it wasn't the languages fault.
But I also feel bad for the Zig project to loose one of their flagship projects, because while I find the project ultimately anachronistic, I know what it's like to pour your sweat, heart and soul into something, and having it replaced within a week is a sobering experience even from afar.
A couple years ago this would have been unthinkable because of how slow legacy codebases and rewrites are.
I wonder if Tigerbeetle will also have problems arguing for their solution now that the other project they can point to for customer assurance is gone. And I wonder if they will follow suit eventually simply due to marketing pressure (after having been bitten by the Zig compiler I was surprised that they were putting their super duper high reliability database on top of it at all, but with another big player using it there was at least some peace of mind for their enterprise customers).
> I wonder if Tigerbeetle will also have problems arguing for their solution now that the other project they can point to for customer assurance is gone.
In general, we never like to appeal to popularity (a logical fallacy), but why would you assume here that we would point to Bun specifically (or any project for that matter) [1] as an example of Zig’s quality?
We prefer to judge Zig’s quality on its own intrinsic merit:
For example, we subject the language through TigerBeetle to inordinate amounts of fuzzing, perhaps more than any other language (you could say Zig is lucky to have TB’s test suite aimed against it!).
Literally 1,024 dedicated CPU cores, 24/7.
Zig holds up remarkably well.
We also recently pledged $512K to the ZSF, together with Synadia.
These are the kinds of things we prefer to point to. Not hype, but real end-to-end systems engineering, and long term financial support, regardless of the language we choose to use.
[1] I picked Zig back in July 2020. At the time, the largest project was River, but already Zig was a phenomenal choice, and the years have only shown that Zig was probably one of the best design decisions in the development of TigerBeetle. It turned out better than I imagined.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the three largest Zig project (by far, with a huge gap between them and the rest of the pack) are Bun, Ghostty, and TigerBeetle.
A language so niche that it only has 3 major projects is a liability. Now it has 2 major projects, one of which is yours. Even I as a weird language connoisseur would raise an eyebrow at that.
After switching from Zig to Rust, I felt like the language was helping me improve the correctness of my project, to argue that the fuzzing of your project helps improve the correctness of the language feels backwards and adds to my suspicions.
We both know that fuzzing is great, but that wether you fuzz with 1000 cores or 1.000.000 cores, at an exponentially growing state space it doesn't make (that much of a) difference (I know that you guys are not doing naive fuzzing, which is extremely cool, but the shape of the problem is still O of evil shaped). Most things you can find with fuzzing are shallow-ish, and if you want to go deeper you need formal verification (for which a strong type system is a good first approximation and I'm not aware of something like Kani in Zig).
I like TigerBeetle and I still wish you guys all the success in the world, but I can't help and wonder where you could be by now if your language was lifting you up, instead of you having to lift up your language.
> Correct me if I'm wrong, but the three largest Zig project
I did correct you where you are wrong (“appeal to popularity” as a logical fallacy).
> I can't help and wonder where you could be by now if your language was lifting you up, instead of you having to lift up your language.
Did you know we’ve had on the order of 3 memory bugs in 6 years of TigerBeetle?
We also reached production in 3.5 years, bringing not only a global consensus implementation, but also a local storage engine to market. (Each of these typically take 5-10 years elsewhere to reach maturity).
Zig does lift us up.
In fact, Zig’s memory model has always been the perfect expression of TigerStyle. And TB could not have been designed the way it is today in any other language (including Rust). Implicit allocation, global allocator… you automatically lose OOM-safety. But the zero-copy intrusive memory techniques we use… Zig is perfect for TigerBeetle.
I'd concur with the sibling commenter; they put their money where their mouth is and they've addressed your arguments, particularly the popularity fallacy.
I'll also say Zig got Bun to their big acquisition; not unlike how other startups started with Ruby and then later to switched to Java at scale. Those startups didn't need to ruminate on their past experience as a horrible mistake or disappointment; they just moved on.
While I don’t have personal experience with either project, I feel it is safe to say that Bun and TigerBeetle are not comparable projects: TigerBeetle has a strong focus on testing and correctness, and Bun maybe not so much. IIRC, TB did well in the Jepsen test and had one segfault in a client library. Bun has had quite a few memory safety issues, in fact, the stated motivation for the Rust move is to eliminate those going forward. We shall see how that pans out.
I doubt the Zig maintainers will miss the giant PRs from Bun!
I'm pretty sure they'll miss the full developer salary that Oven used to sponsor them, which they no longer do. I'd wager one doesn't do a rewrite like that, if you are in great personal standing with the language foundation.
That same "just don't use it" attitude was what drove me away from Zig btw. I would have been fine in restricting myself to a somewhat stable subset, e.g. if, loop + function calls, but they didn't want to provide any tiered stability guarantees for the language.
Opinionated is great, no local minima is great, but you have to accept that if you don't want to engage with the needs of your (professional) community then what you do is a hobby project. A very cool hobby project beloved by thousands, but a hobby project.
I think if you use a programming language that is clearly version zero you can't complain that it's not stable...
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