Zig quits GitHub, says Microsoft's AI obsession has ruined the service • Hacker News Board

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

#421

Post by oaiey » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 5:44 PM UTC

intalentive wrote: post #383

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…

Kelly’s indignant attitude and commitment to “engineering excellence” suggest a bright future for Zig. It’s good to see the leader of a technical project get angry about mediocrity.

[..] in a product not people. Insulting people is never a solution.

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

#422

Post by crystal_revenge » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 5:44 PM UTC

CyberDildonics wrote: post #371

styanax wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In all seriousness, this comment really makes me want to try out Zig!

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

#423

Post by RagnarD » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 5:44 PM UTC

AdamN wrote: post #411

shevy-java wrote: post #409

The reason is a bit strange. To me it seems as if Zig is just very opinionated. Personally I think the decision to move to Codeberg was made independently of Microsoft being a problem. I don't dispute that Microsoft is a problem; I just don't see many great alternatives to github either. Gitlab consistently is worse for me as a user. I think the bigger problem is that these big megacorporations control so much. I fin…

How is Bitbucket these days in comparison? Is it no longer even a player?

I used to use it, but left as it became apparent that Atlassian was increasingly incompetent in both software and business aspects to the point of both being badly broken.

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

#424

Post by athorax » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 5:44 PM UTC

AdamN wrote: post #411

shevy-java wrote: post #409

The reason is a bit strange. To me it seems as if Zig is just very opinionated. Personally I think the decision to move to Codeberg was made independently of Microsoft being a problem. I don't dispute that Microsoft is a problem; I just don't see many great alternatives to github either. Gitlab consistently is worse for me as a user. I think the bigger problem is that these big megacorporations control so much. I fin…

How is Bitbucket these days in comparison? Is it no longer even a player?

Lets put it this way, no engineer is choosing to use bitbucket. You use it because some SVP made the mistake of choosing atlassian software a decade ago and refuses to change.

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

#425

Post by venturecruelty » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 5:47 PM UTC

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.

People who are unhappy with Zig are free to use something else and not engage with the community.

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

#426

Post by venturecruelty » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 5:47 PM UTC

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…

That's crazy! He should've left the original.

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

#427

Post by a-dub » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 5:48 PM UTC

github actions is pretty terrible.

the self hosted runner host is some horrific dotnet csharp mono monstrosity and "language" is some javascript wrapper nonsense that needlessly creates a half baked dsl around running basic shell commands.

it has a pretty ui, but that's about it.

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

#428

Post by lenkite » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 5:48 PM UTC

krashidov wrote: post #390

MiddleEndian wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More and more people should call out bloated buggy JS frameworks lol

Isn't github a rails app that heavily uses server side rendering?

Not any longer. The rewrite which destroyed performance uses ReactJS https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44799861

What is terrible is that new developers think that this has been the usual poor state of things...this is why Zig & others moving to alternate platforms is good.

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

#429

Post by oaiey » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 5:48 PM UTC

acessoproibido wrote: post #238

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

to quote something I said a day ago about AI spotting in the posts of other people: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46114083 "I think that writing style is more LinkedIn than LLM, the style of people who might get slapped down if they wrote something individual. Much of the world has agreed to sound like machines."

This has always been the case in the "corporate/professional" world imo. It's just much easier now for "laypeople" to also adjust their style to this. My prediction is people will get quickly tired of it (as evidenced by your comment)

Question: would you go to a public place and call a person who is listening to you a loser or a monkey with the risk of getting your face smashed in?

Companies do public announcement with the risk of getting sued left and right. Normal people chose careful words in public. In the Internet it seems different rules apply in public. Laypeople are not adjusting to corporate talk, laypeople are more and more aware of the public of the Internet and behave accordingly (most are, like in real life, mute)

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

#430

Post by brabel » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 5:48 PM UTC

Meneth wrote: post #30

jazzyjackson wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would zig care that a project written in zig is used for AI?

And if they did, what could they possibly do?

As Bun uses Zig quite a lot, I expect them to be quite active in the Zig forums and submitting patches and feature requests.

I was thinking of things like AI-generated patches submitted by Bun to the Zig project, or feature requests by Bun for AI-specific use cases... that could create a really bad atmosphere between Zig and Bun people if the Zig Foundation continuously rejects their contributions/requests/discussions.