You imply that being written by AI automatically makes its arguments invalid or less compelling somehow.
I'm not invested in Zig in any way, but I agree with the article's framing and find it persuasive. I couldn't care less if was written by AI or a real person.
I build based on libghostty, but with Typescript and Golang. I read this article precisely because I was worried about the future of Zig, despite not programming in it directly.
Thankful for the Hashimoto support of both organizations' financial sources: Zig Software Foundation and Ghostty via Hack Club. Thus both projects have external accountability. Hopefully that can help long term viability issues and alleviate the projects' social and financial pressures, as well as guide the projects technological and management choices. If that scaffolding didn't exist, I might not have chosen the platform.
Python got successful thanks to Zope, and being a better Perl in the late 90's.
Followed by being embraced by the scientific community like CERN and Fermilab, for build tools and scripting C++ and Fortran libraries, before taking off with AI.
Thats only because the chicken and egg problem prevents it. We are in a new world where this problem is solvable. Fake it until you make it. Use the LLM to give you what you want first and humans can backfill what is important later.
Meh, Zig doesn't owe anyone anything. If you want a blub language that won't break compatibility, use Golang. If you want a fully mature low-level language, use C.
Not really active in the Zig space but it doesn't really give me a good impression how Kelley appears to use Zig as his personal megaphone. For instance the GitHub migration post, which I don't disagree with, but was written like an emotionally charged personal blog post.
re stability/backward-compatibility: that's not inherently a bad thing if it leads to better abstractions, also easier w/ ai assistance now to adapt when there are changes
(python 2 to python 3 migration would have been less of an issue now as well)
> The recurring theme is that Zig's maintainers appear more interested in enforcing their vision of how software should be developed than making Zig a practical tool for people who want to build software. And that is a serious problem for a programming language.
Not true! It just means (realizing a) vision is more important to them than becoming popular. It's their choice to make.
I don't think you end up with a project like Zig by wanting to compromise and ship quick to watch adoption grow. That doesn't make it any more stable at the moment, or necessarily any time soon, but it does mean you actually get a language like Zig.
I do wish there was a little less drama involved with Zig. Seems to be the curse of programming languages.
I also wish this article had a more... human touch. Not because of the phrasing etc, it just repeats itself a lot and a quick steer for brevity would have gone a long way.
The stability comment makes some sense but the rest of this article is just complaining for the sake of complaining. Clearly their "no AI contributions" policy is not preventing the language and ecosystem from improving. And nobody says you can't use AI to make Zig programs.
True, but the whole idea of the Zig foundation is to set Zig up to go places. If they don't intend to go anywhere, they shouldn't be running a foundation and accepting donations.
Andrew already opened up about using LLMs for finding bugs but it will be done after they covered all other bug finding methods. This opening up came from what the sqlite guys presented about using LLMs for finding bugs and the zig compiler team hinted at following the same bug squashing route that the sqlite guys followed.
It's was in a presentation given at the tigerbeetle guys event.
Time will tell, but using Bun moving to Rust as evidence that Zig is doing it wrong is hilariously backward. Bun YOLOs a vibe code Rust port as it is absorbed by an AI company and you think it was the language ecosystem at issue?
I maintain many large Zig projects (see profile) and none of this matters to me at all. Why should I care what the core team thinks about AI, which code forge they use, or what internet drama happened between them and Bun? I'm too busy building things to care about this HN gossip. It doesn't affect my use of Zig as a tool.
The point about constant compatibility breakage is the only valid one, but users are naturally self-selecting on that. I knew what I was getting into when I chose Zig. The upside is that the language isn't getting saddled by poor early designs (the "Writergate" breakage was a huge design improvement, as is the new Io interface). Also, it goes without saying that LLMs have dramatically reduced the cost of dealing with breaking changes, and the core team isn't going to stop you from using it.
For everyone to be aware this site's about page states:
"""
This is a site designed to serve as a center for information - and by "center," we mean center. ByteCode.News is a site fed from discord, slack, IRC, and here on the web, meaning to present a common information graph and a common set of services.
"""
From my quick skimming of the site it just looks like hundreds of AI articles. More than likely it's just an AI bot that generates articles after some threshold of engagement is reached on "discord, slack, IRC".
Learning Technologies makes some interesting WASM powered software, I'm glad to see people are making a living working on this.
Your article was much better, but I do wish the linked deep dive on CheerpJ was a bit meatier, it's more of an overview. A deeper dive about the trade offs of the implementation and other challenges you faced getting the JIT working inside WASM would certainly do well here.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 931 ms ] threadI'm not invested in Zig in any way, but I agree with the article's framing and find it persuasive. I couldn't care less if was written by AI or a real person.
Even less so, in AI driven development age, that the Zig community is notoriously against.
Interesting language for the last century, between Modula-2, Object Pascal, C, C++ and co.
In 2026, less Interesting.
Maybe not unavoidable product, but zig has a vision, do not need to go different direction or make product immediately or die
Thankful for the Hashimoto support of both organizations' financial sources: Zig Software Foundation and Ghostty via Hack Club. Thus both projects have external accountability. Hopefully that can help long term viability issues and alleviate the projects' social and financial pressures, as well as guide the projects technological and management choices. If that scaffolding didn't exist, I might not have chosen the platform.
You are saying they Zig is uninteresting because they don't want to pander to the current fads?
Let them cook. Perhaps they want to work on the core language for now, and maybe in 2-3 years time they can focus on the framework.
Or maybe they don't care about being popular. A passion project that is being worked on for a small group's enjoyment can still be interesting.
Followed by being embraced by the scientific community like CERN and Fermilab, for build tools and scripting C++ and Fortran libraries, before taking off with AI.
The important question is when/whether it will hit 1.0 and what its commitment to stability looks like _afterwards_.
(python 2 to python 3 migration would have been less of an issue now as well)
personally, I'm more alarmed that they're dropping LLVM in favor of their own backend.
good luck, boys.
Not true! It just means (realizing a) vision is more important to them than becoming popular. It's their choice to make.
I do wish there was a little less drama involved with Zig. Seems to be the curse of programming languages.
I also wish this article had a more... human touch. Not because of the phrasing etc, it just repeats itself a lot and a quick steer for brevity would have gone a long way.
There should be no slop code, no slop words, NO WAY TO TELL.
I couldn't give less of a shit if you use AI if nobody in the world could possibly tell. But that's not what any of this is about.
It’s fine for them to just be.
> No LLMs for finding bugs.
Good luck with that in the era of LLM-discovered security vulnerabilities.
[1] https://ziglang.org/code-of-conduct/
It's was in a presentation given at the tigerbeetle guys event.
source: https://youtu.be/zwi5b5xSsKA?t=1774
Is it 1.0 yet?
The whole point of not being stable yet is so that you can try things out and see what actually makes sense before committing to it for all time.
(Counterpoint: C++, JavaScript xD)
I guess it has been like 10 years at this point though.
The way I read it, the post seems to argue they have enough users already to seriously consider cutting the first stable release.
The point about constant compatibility breakage is the only valid one, but users are naturally self-selecting on that. I knew what I was getting into when I chose Zig. The upside is that the language isn't getting saddled by poor early designs (the "Writergate" breakage was a huge design improvement, as is the new Io interface). Also, it goes without saying that LLMs have dramatically reduced the cost of dealing with breaking changes, and the core team isn't going to stop you from using it.
""" This is a site designed to serve as a center for information - and by "center," we mean center. ByteCode.News is a site fed from discord, slack, IRC, and here on the web, meaning to present a common information graph and a common set of services. """
From my quick skimming of the site it just looks like hundreds of AI articles. More than likely it's just an AI bot that generates articles after some threshold of engagement is reached on "discord, slack, IRC".
There are lots of Ads that are posted as if they are articles for example: https://bytecode.news/posts/2026/10/cheerpj-5-launches-java-...
The article itself is just an extremely odd hit piece against Zig, I'd even be guess this is a form of "rage/engagement bait".
https://labs.leaningtech.com/blog/cheerpj-5.0
Your article was much better, but I do wish the linked deep dive on CheerpJ was a bit meatier, it's more of an overview. A deeper dive about the trade offs of the implementation and other challenges you faced getting the JIT working inside WASM would certainly do well here.
Just because AI bros can't put "Zig compiler" contributor on their linkedin page or CV doesn't make it an shit language.