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Zig quits GitHub, says Microsoft's AI obsession has ruined the service

theregister.com

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Re: Zig quits GitHub, says Microsoft's AI obsession has ruined the service

#371

Post by CyberDildonics »

styanax wrote: post #145
brushfoot wrote: post #139

The edit history of the announcement is quite a ride: > [2025-11-27T02:10:07Z] it’s abundantly clear that the talented folks who used to work on the product have moved on to bigger and better things, with the remaining losers eager to inflict some kind of bloated, buggy JavaScript framework on us in the name of progress [1] > [2025-11-27T14:04:47Z] it’s abundantly clear that the talented folks who used to work on the…

On the previous HN article, I recall many a comment talking about how they should change this, leave the politics/negative juju out because it was a bad look for the Zig community. It would appear they listened to that feedback, swallowed their ego/pride and did what was best for the Zig community with these edits. I commend them for their actions in doing what's best for the community at the cost of some personal me…

Zig is the language that was intentionally made to fail and error out on windows carriage returns instead of parsing them like every language ever made. They made a version for windows and then made it not work with every windows text editor. Their answer was to 'get better text editors' or 'make a preprocessing program to strip out carriage returns' or 'don't use windows' (they had a windows executable).

This is not a group with community or pragmatism from the start.

Re: Zig quits GitHub, says Microsoft's AI obsession has ruined the service

#372

Post by ethin »

arccy wrote: post #262
brushfoot wrote: post #139

The edit history of the announcement is quite a ride: > [2025-11-27T02:10:07Z] it’s abundantly clear that the talented folks who used to work on the product have moved on to bigger and better things, with the remaining losers eager to inflict some kind of bloated, buggy JavaScript framework on us in the name of progress [1] > [2025-11-27T14:04:47Z] it’s abundantly clear that the talented folks who used to work on the…

this Corporate Americanism is of only positivity and fake smiles is exactly how we end up with enshittified products, because no one is ever called out for it. If the feedback is too soft, it just gets swept under the rug. we need less self censorship, not more.

Fully agreed. I can't upvote yet (nto enough Karma) but corpospeak is IMO never the solution unless your in court or something.

Re: Zig quits GitHub, says Microsoft's AI obsession has ruined the service

#373

Post by mmaunder »

brushfoot wrote: post #139

The edit history of the announcement is quite a ride: > [2025-11-27T02:10:07Z] it’s abundantly clear that the talented folks who used to work on the product have moved on to bigger and better things, with the remaining losers eager to inflict some kind of bloated, buggy JavaScript framework on us in the name of progress [1] > [2025-11-27T14:04:47Z] it’s abundantly clear that the talented folks who used to work on the…

Anger is a mind killer. Build software out of love. Love for engineering, innovation, creation, and love of working with people who feel the same way.

Re: Zig quits GitHub, says Microsoft's AI obsession has ruined the service

#374

Post by WolfeReader »

snarfy wrote: post #319
zerofor_conduct wrote: post #299

I feel that training copilot on Github repos without maintainer consent was a betrayal - this pushed many projects over to Gitlab.

You could say the same for any content used for training.

You could and you should.

Re: Zig quits GitHub, says Microsoft's AI obsession has ruined the service

#375

Post by lukeschlather »

IgorPartola wrote: post #268
flohofwoe wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Github became successful long before those 'social media features' were added, simply because it provided free hosting for open source projects (and free hosting services were still a rare thing back in the noughties). The previous popular free code hoster was Sourceforge, which eventually entered its what's now called "enshittifcation phase". Github was simply in the right place at the right time to replace Sourcefo…

Technically so was BitBucket but it chose mercurial over git initially. If you are old enough you will remember articles comparing the two with mercurial getting slightly more favorable reviews. And for those who don’t remember SourceForge, it had two major problems in DevEx: first you couldn’t just get your open source project published. It had to be approved. And once it did, you had an ugly URL. GitHub had pretty…

Github was faster than BitBucket and it worked well whether or not JavaScript was enabled. This does seem to be regressing as of late. I have tried a variety of alternatives; they have all been slower, but Github does seem to be regressing.

Re: Zig quits GitHub, says Microsoft's AI obsession has ruined the service

#376

Post by SoftTalker »

gortok wrote: post #228
jack_pp wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is political correctness necessary to have a thriving community / open source project? Linux seems to be doing fine. I wouldn't personally care either way but it is non-obvious to me that the first version would actually hurt the community.

How you treat others says everything about you and nothing about the other person. In this case, the unnecessary insults detract from the otherwise important message, and reflect poorly on Zig. They were right to edit it.

On the other hand some notable open source leaders seem to be abrasive assholes. Linus, Theo, DHH, just three examples who come to mind. I think if you have a clear vision of what you want your project to be then being agressively dismissive of ideas that don't further that vision is necessary just to keep the noise to a low roar.

Re: Zig quits GitHub, says Microsoft's AI obsession has ruined the service

#377

Post by do_not_redeem »

kragen wrote: post #364
watwut wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No evidence was erased as the evidence exists.

You mean, on a third-party website that currently happens to have a capture of the page outside of the Zig team's control, one which can go down at any time?

The site is open source and the commits are still there. No need to be so dramatic.

https://github.com/ziglang/www.ziglang.org/commit/c8d046b288...

Re: Zig quits GitHub, says Microsoft's AI obsession has ruined the service

#378

Post by a2800276 »

aidenn0 wrote: post #332
dannersy wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I often find we don't appreciate enough people accepting their failures and changing their mind. For some reason I see the opposite: people respecting those who "stick to their guns" or double down when something is clearly wrong. As you say, the context matters and these edits seem to be learning from the feedback rather than saving face since the sentiment stands, just in a less needlessly targeted way.

I think it's because when people do a 180 due to public pressure, it's hard to know to what degree they changed their mind and to what degree they are just lying about what is on their mind.

Toning down aggressive phrasing is not "doing a 180", calling the change from "only losers left at GitHub" to "the engineering excellence has left" lying seems disingenuous.

Re: Zig quits GitHub, says Microsoft's AI obsession has ruined the service

#379

Post by vthriller »

jappgar wrote: post #185
vthriller wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In addition, it is best to use code navigation simply in a web browser How do you define "code navigation"? It might've got a bit easier with automatic highlighting of selected symbols, but in return source code viewer got way too laggy and, for a couple of years now, it has this weird bug with misplaced cursors if code is scrolled horizontally. I actually find myself using the "raw" button more and more often, or…

Hint: Type the '.' key on any code page or PR.

And now it opens... some VSCode-esque editor in the browser that asks me to sign-in? Why would I want something even more resource-hungry and convoluted just to look up a random thing once in a while?

Re: Zig quits GitHub, says Microsoft's AI obsession has ruined the service

#380

Post by jappgar »

vthriller wrote: post #379
jappgar wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hint: Type the '.' key on any code page or PR.

And now it opens... some VSCode-esque editor in the browser that asks me to sign-in? Why would I want something even more resource-hungry and convoluted just to look up a random thing once in a while?

If you're familiar with VSCode it's quite handy. If you hate VSCode for some reason then just don't use it.
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