Can I hop in here and ask: As someone who hasn't done any systems programming in a decade, what would be more interesting to learn on the side, Zig or Rust? I've been in the Python world and seeing tools like uv and ruff, makes me biased towards Rust but Zig seems to be attracting a lot of hype recently?
Very good news. Happy to see Zig getting more investment. I already use the build system for production systems and am looking forward to writing some more Zig when projects allow.
Having a modern language that attempts to directly model low level systems is very important.
I’m guessing they chose $512,000 because “512” is a power of 2 and systems programmers love that sort of shit, but 2^19 is 524,288. I mean $12,288 is not insignificant but it would have been cooler.
> We did have three bugs that would have been prevented by the borrow checker, but these were caught by our fuzzers and online verification. We run a fuzzing fleet of 1,000 dedicated CPU cores 24/7.
Remember people, 10,000 CPU hours of fuzzing can save you 5ms of borrow checking!
(I’m joking, I’m joking, Zig and Rust are both great languages, fuzzing does more than just borrow checking, and I do think TigerBeetle’s choices make sense, I just couldn’t help noticing the irony of those two sentences.)
If Zig does eventually save the world one day, it'll be just as much thanks to TigerBeetle as to the Zig Foundation itself.
Having a serious, dedicated, and smart partner, in industry, working hard to operationalize and turn a profit on the language is a massive boon to the whole project (and it would be even if they didn't choose to give back monetarily, but all the more since they are!).
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 27.3 ms ] threadEdit: Thank you all for your responses!
Having a modern language that attempts to directly model low level systems is very important.
i understand zig as a better C, but in what world is another memory unsafe language a good idea?
i mean i kinda get if the thing you are writing would require LOTS of unsafe, then zig provides better ergonomics
however most programs can definitely be written without unsafe and in that case i dont get why wed do this to ourselves in 2025
why not take advantage of memory safe, and data race safety?
Discussion then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45703926
The Rust Foundation on the otherhand…
Remember people, 10,000 CPU hours of fuzzing can save you 5ms of borrow checking!
(I’m joking, I’m joking, Zig and Rust are both great languages, fuzzing does more than just borrow checking, and I do think TigerBeetle’s choices make sense, I just couldn’t help noticing the irony of those two sentences.)
Having a serious, dedicated, and smart partner, in industry, working hard to operationalize and turn a profit on the language is a massive boon to the whole project (and it would be even if they didn't choose to give back monetarily, but all the more since they are!).