In performing an assessment of which ecosystem and PL to use to develop our high-integrity automation software for mission-critical applications, we assessed Rust, Zig, and Ada/SPARK. Rust had the support behind it from a big corp., a passionate developer community, and some adoption by significant entities, but none with cyber-physical systems. And it has been interesting to see some developers leaving Rust for Zig for the sheer enjoyment of using it instead. Our software will be controlling machinery overhead and other close coupling with machinery and people. Rust does not have the legacy in these areas or the ecosystem to cover formal verification. Zig was considered, but was even more new than Rust, and had similar disadvantages as listed for Rust. SPARK, a relatively newer PL, a subset of Ada, has legacy in high-integrity, mission-critical applications, and formal verification tooling that along with human review, makes it the strongest choice to meet the government's latest push for such critical software, and the language though verbose, is low friction to learn and apply. I found Zig to be a great second choice, and look forward to both Rust and Zig's future. Glad to see Zig moving along since Andrew started it. Congrats Andrew and the team currently pulling this off!
TigerBeetle and Synadia pledge $512k to the Zig Software Foundation
11–20 of 213 posts
Re: TigerBeetle and Synadia pledge $512k to the Zig Software Foundation
#12> For each of our companies to donate $256,000 in monthly installments over the next two years, with Synadia matching TigerBeetle, for a total of $512,000 Why over 2 years? Like VC investment, Id assume a lump sum up front allow them to move faster with that money (hiring the right people sooner, etc.) I wonder if projects like this care more about predictability of income (e.g. not hiring people depending on future…
Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast.
Re: TigerBeetle and Synadia pledge $512k to the Zig Software Foundation
#13Is nats not written in go? Or does this foreshadow a switch to zig?
They have clients in many languages. But the zig repo is still just a placeholder. They often have bare bones servers in the languages too, like rust has one, but I think they are mostly for testing.
I'll shamelessly plug this. I think this is the most complete NATS client for Zig, matching the official clients in API and features: https://github.com/lalinsky/nats.zig
In fact, working on this client prompted me to start working on another Zig project, asynchronous I/O framework, which I'll be integrating with the NATS client soon: https://github.com/lalinsky/zio
Re: TigerBeetle and Synadia pledge $512k to the Zig Software Foundation
#14In performing an assessment of which ecosystem and PL to use to develop our high-integrity automation software for mission-critical applications, we assessed Rust, Zig, and Ada/SPARK. Rust had the support behind it from a big corp., a passionate developer community, and some adoption by significant entities, but none with cyber-physical systems. And it has been interesting to see some developers leaving Rust for Zig…
Interesting to see this. I bought a book on Ada 2012 awhile back. Pretty cool stuff - especially with Spark.
The license model always made me uncomfortable for when you were using the commercial compilers though. Does this lock you into Spark forever?
Re: TigerBeetle and Synadia pledge $512k to the Zig Software Foundation
#15Real programmers would have donated $524,288. But seriously good news nonetheless.
For those who don't intuitively think in base 2,
2¹⁹ bytes, or 512KiB.
Re: TigerBeetle and Synadia pledge $512k to the Zig Software Foundation
#16> For each of our companies to donate $256,000 in monthly installments over the next two years, with Synadia matching TigerBeetle, for a total of $512,000 Why over 2 years? Like VC investment, Id assume a lump sum up front allow them to move faster with that money (hiring the right people sooner, etc.) I wonder if projects like this care more about predictability of income (e.g. not hiring people depending on future…
Most businesses prefer to make payments monthly because it's easier on cash flow.
Re: TigerBeetle and Synadia pledge $512k to the Zig Software Foundation
#17> For each of our companies to donate $256,000 in monthly installments over the next two years, with Synadia matching TigerBeetle, for a total of $512,000 Why over 2 years? Like VC investment, Id assume a lump sum up front allow them to move faster with that money (hiring the right people sooner, etc.) I wonder if projects like this care more about predictability of income (e.g. not hiring people depending on future…
Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast.
I heard that very recently in a movie, just cannot recall which one.
Re: TigerBeetle and Synadia pledge $512k to the Zig Software Foundation
#18Re: TigerBeetle and Synadia pledge $512k to the Zig Software Foundation
#19Re: TigerBeetle and Synadia pledge $512k to the Zig Software Foundation
#20In performing an assessment of which ecosystem and PL to use to develop our high-integrity automation software for mission-critical applications, we assessed Rust, Zig, and Ada/SPARK. Rust had the support behind it from a big corp., a passionate developer community, and some adoption by significant entities, but none with cyber-physical systems. And it has been interesting to see some developers leaving Rust for Zig…
>leaving Rust for Zig for the sheer enjoyment of using it instead.
What do people find more enjoyable?