In spare time, myself and a few others are working on a game engine in Zig[0], and the Zig core team has been very receptive to addressing issues our project faces and supporting us.
Others are working on pixel art editors[1], open source 2D RPG games[2], there's a group of independent folks working on a 3D massive immersive sim game[3], a group working on making Zig an amazing language for micro-controllers[4], etc.
Please consider donating $5-10 a month to the ZSF! They are a great group of people, and it has so many knock-on effects for others in the FOSS community. :)
[1] https://github.com/foxnne/pixi
[2] https://github.com/foxnne/aftersun
It's great to see the dollars spent so frugally (they are paying something like 60-65% market of average devs) but this is a long-term project so sustainability cannot be ignored. Sooner or later contributors will face tough life choices.
Obviously, that means slower development unless funding shoots up for some reason, and 1.0 already seems far away, but I think otherwise there's too high a risk that it never happens or happens in an ultimately un-useful way.
Anyway, I always thought this project was valuable (that's why I started supporting it), but since I've been following it, I've found I also like the way it is run so I guess I should put my money where my mouth is... I just went up to $15/mo.
I honestly can't predict whether or not this will succeed, but I'm pretty sure it's worth a try.
I am going to both increase my donation and figure out how to hookup my corporate matching, didn’t know that was possible.
Base for everyone!
That's really cool. Sometimes I think about donating to the PSF, but I don't really care about PyCon.
I think it's no coincidence that Python is one of the most popular programming languages in the world.
https://thefortunate.blog/diversification-is-the-future-for-...
> Out of USD4.5MM of revenue for the PSF in 2019, around 63% of it came from PyCon. USD1.9MM was the costs of having PyCon, which means that for every dollar spent on PyCon, the PSF gets back 1.50 dollars.
https://pyfound.blogspot.com/2020/03/psfs-projected-2020-fin...
Obviously, the revenue has sharply dropped for a time because of COVID, but I'd be surprised if PyCon is run at a loss nowadays.
So you can assume none of your sponsorship money goes to running PyCon.
For example, Firefox the software project depends on many other essential components that are not strictly a software project but Firefox can't survive without them---developer and test infrastructures, addons.mozilla.org, localization platform (Pontoon) and so on. And there are more nuanced projects like Rust and Servo that might shape the next decade of Firefox. And yet there are technically uninteresting but financially positive projects like Pocket Premium and VPN, which started to provide a significant portion of the revenue [1] and represents a less dependence on Google's search royalties.
Requiring specific goals only makes sense when donors exactly know all those dependencies---an unreasonable assumption. In fact, if a majority of the revenue came from such donations, it would be very disastrous. Thankfully for Mozilla, it doesn't depend too much on donations (~2% of the total revenue in 2022), but then those donations don't mean much financially anyway.
There are alternative schemes as well. For example, donations may have wishes that are not guaranteed but to be explicitly considered (I think Vim did so for a long time). This is better than enforced goals, but not without a problem because significant donations would affect developers regardless of the acceptance anyway.
[1] https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2022/mozilla-fdn-202... (Specifically "Subscription and advertising revenue", which accounted for ~13% of the total revenue in 2022)
Few days back there was topic "Rust contributor's burnout" here on HN. I understand it maybe a sensitive topic but from outside it feels contributors working on Zig seem generally happy and excited about their contributions. And I think this is more important than number of features crammed or 1.0 release deadline committed to.
The Zig Software Foundation is very organized and has their stuff together. Hopefully other languages follow the ZSF's lead.
Or here's another example. An interview they published with one of the developers whom they awarded a grant to. He worked on a Rust implementation of git and was awarded the grant to integrate it with cargo, the Rust build tool. (https://foundation.rust-lang.org/news/community-grantee-spot...)
Or a technical article about artifact signing (https://foundation.rust-lang.org/news/2023-12-21-improving-s...)
Do you still think that the Rust foundation writes "legal bullshit"?
> Uber uses Zig to compile its C/C++ code.
> Uber does not have any plans to use zig-the-language yet.
Traditionally cross-compilation needed a separate copy of everything per target, which is really annoying but not really impossible. Any large enough company would therefore just build an infrastructure and put dedicated employees for cross-compilation. Tools like `zig cc` would benefit the rest---smaller companies and individuals---but you can't really expect those to kickstart the development of such tools from the beginning. Thankfully, `zig cc` was born as a byproduct so it had time to mature within the Zig project. And given we now have a working `zig cc`, larger companies can consider `zig cc` and possibly donate to the ZSF, even if that's only for `zig cc`.
I hope they're able to raise the money they need to fulfil their ambitious roadmap!
Just curious why a static site would cost so much even on AWS? Would it be many downloads of large-ish binary files?
On the other hand, what's the timeline for 1.0? I might stick with C and C++, but always glad to see Zig to succeed.
Capitalism is a relatively recent invention with a narrower definition that what most people think.
In any case, wealth and power distribution is highly related to network effects. Regardless of skills, being a servant of kings will give you more wealth and power than being a free individual in the desert.
What part of this is hard to understand? They dont earn as much and they are spending it as wisely and as efficiently and as high as they could afford while they are willing to work for.
Even interns and junior engineers in the US earn more than in Europe.
I don't think this will change any time soon.
This is such a common and controversial topic of discussion I wonder why you're trying to derail a Zig thread with such offtopic bait.
