Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

TigerBeetle and Synadia pledge $512k to the Zig Software Foundation

tigerbeetle.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 213 posts

Re: TigerBeetle and Synadia pledge $512k to the Zig Software Foundation

#51

Post by jtrueb »

jorangreef wrote: post #47
jtrueb wrote: post #46

The reason for not choosing Rust still doesn't make any sense to me. If you don’t want to OOM, need correctness, are following the power of ten (where you aren’t allocating anyways), I don’t see the conflict or harm of additional enforced correctness. Also, Rust does support checked arithmetic and has stable toolchains.

Out of interest, did you read the two posts [0][1] linked in there by matklad, creator of rust-analyzer as well as IntelliJ Rust, on our team? Suffice to say, we know the intrusive memory and comptime patterns we use in our code base, and they wouldn't be as natural to express in a language other than Zig. Rust is a great language, but Zig made more sense for what I wanted to create in TigerBeetle. [0] https://matkla…

Yeah, I think BDFL wants to use Zig. I understand that it is nice for Zig to feel more like C, and that can be fun. If the toolchain is so far away from being mature, how long will it take the database to be mature?

Since previous comment was edited. I would clarify that I don’t doubt the engineering capabilities, just the timeline. A from scratch database in _established_ toolchains take 5-10 years. The Zig toolchain also is going to be evolving in the same timeframe or longer. The codegen, linking, architecture specific bugs etc. Isn’t it double the effort to bring to bear in the market?

Re: TigerBeetle and Synadia pledge $512k to the Zig Software Foundation

#52

Post by tazjin »

tm11zz wrote: post #40

> We run a fuzzing fleet of 1,000 dedicated CPU cores 24/7. that a lot

Assuming they're being economical (and considering the level of thinking TigerBeetle seems to put into stuff - they probably are) this might be only a few beefy physical servers.

For them it seems safety and QA is a large part of the sales pitch, so that seems worth it.

Re: TigerBeetle and Synadia pledge $512k to the Zig Software Foundation

#54

Post by jorangreef »

tazjin wrote: post #52
tm11zz wrote: post #40

> We run a fuzzing fleet of 1,000 dedicated CPU cores 24/7. that a lot

Assuming they're being economical (and considering the level of thinking TigerBeetle seems to put into stuff - they probably are) this might be only a few beefy physical servers. For them it seems safety and QA is a large part of the sales pitch, so that seems worth it.

Thanks! It's around 21 boxes, 48 cores each [1], and in Finland so there's natural efficient cooling.

Fun fact, Hetzner were surprised at the size of the order, and sent us an email to confirm. ;P

[1] https://x.com/TigerBeetleDB/status/1841089728935821674/quote...

Re: TigerBeetle and Synadia pledge $512k to the Zig Software Foundation

#56

Post by lxe »

I'm absolutely struggling to understand what Synadia even does. it's been an infuriating experience navigating through their marketing site. It's been minutes and I still don't understand what it is. What is NATS?

Edit: I had to google what NATS.IO is. The marketing site is infuriatingly useless. Please, can we stop doing this?

Edit: At the bottom on the footer it says compare NATS to Kafka. It took me to a page that requires me to enter my email, name, and a message in order to download the white paper. I flipped over my desk in rage.

Re: TigerBeetle and Synadia pledge $512k to the Zig Software Foundation

#57

Post by jorangreef »

jtrueb wrote: post #51
jorangreef wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of interest, did you read the two posts [0][1] linked in there by matklad, creator of rust-analyzer as well as IntelliJ Rust, on our team? Suffice to say, we know the intrusive memory and comptime patterns we use in our code base, and they wouldn't be as natural to express in a language other than Zig. Rust is a great language, but Zig made more sense for what I wanted to create in TigerBeetle. [0] https://matkla…

Yeah, I think BDFL wants to use Zig. I understand that it is nice for Zig to feel more like C, and that can be fun. If the toolchain is so far away from being mature, how long will it take the database to be mature? Since previous comment was edited. I would clarify that I don’t doubt the engineering capabilities, just the timeline. A from scratch database in _established_ toolchains take 5-10 years. The Zig toolchai…

You're right! In the past, distributed databases written without Deterministic Simulation Testing (DST) would typically take around ~10 years (~5 years for the consensus protocol and ~5 years for the storage engine). And then not without bugs.

However, and we write about this also in the post, but TigerStyle and DST enabled us to ship TigerBeetle to production in 3.5 years, in less time, to a higher standard, and to be the first distributed database with an explicit storage fault model (Kyle Kingsbury added new storage fault injectors to Jepsen) solving Protocol-Aware Recovery.

Our Jepsen audit is here (also linked in the post): https://jepsen.io/analyses/tigerbeetle-0.16.11

For more on TigerStyle as a methodology, hope you enjoy this talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3WYdYyjek4

Re: TigerBeetle and Synadia pledge $512k to the Zig Software Foundation

#58

Post by [deleted] »

lxe wrote: post #56

I'm absolutely struggling to understand what Synadia even does. it's been an infuriating experience navigating through their marketing site. It's been minutes and I still don't understand what it is. What is NATS? Edit: I had to google what NATS.IO is. The marketing site is infuriatingly useless. Please, can we stop doing this? Edit: At the bottom on the footer it says compare NATS to Kafka. It took me to a page that…

[deleted]

Re: TigerBeetle and Synadia pledge $512k to the Zig Software Foundation

#59

Post by jmull »

meindnoch wrote: post #29

That's about 1 year's worth of salary of a full-time dev.

According to their financial statement, the Zig Foundation pays contributors $60/hr, and spent $154K on their single employee (Andrew Kelley) in 2024.

So that's around 3-4+ years of development.

(Also, that $154K might include significant employer expenses not typically included in salary, like, e.g. healthcare.)

https://ziglang.org/news/2025-financials/

Re: TigerBeetle and Synadia pledge $512k to the Zig Software Foundation

#60

Post by jtrueb »

jorangreef wrote: post #57
jtrueb wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I think BDFL wants to use Zig. I understand that it is nice for Zig to feel more like C, and that can be fun. If the toolchain is so far away from being mature, how long will it take the database to be mature? Since previous comment was edited. I would clarify that I don’t doubt the engineering capabilities, just the timeline. A from scratch database in _established_ toolchains take 5-10 years. The Zig toolchai…

You're right! In the past, distributed databases written without Deterministic Simulation Testing (DST) would typically take around ~10 years (~5 years for the consensus protocol and ~5 years for the storage engine). And then not without bugs. However, and we write about this also in the post, but TigerStyle and DST enabled us to ship TigerBeetle to production in 3.5 years, in less time, to a higher standard, and to…

I was on a team with a similar timeline with C++ (4 year). All the language and toolchain difficulties came after shipping. Meeting new customer needs meant shifting from greenfield to brownfield engineering. We were chasing down strange platform and provider behaviors. Adding features while maintaining performance and correctness, meant relying on knowledge of tools available in the broader community. Solutions for build issues came through a combination of in-house effort and industry partners with related experience. Having two stable compilers (gcc and clang) was super helpful.
Post reply on HN