How is Zig doing as a project? I remember they took a hard line against AI

They seem to be doing fine. Tigerbeetle and Ghostty are two projects that continue to do well and are written in Zig. The foundation’s funding also seems to be doing well. They are continuing to make releases.

It looks like they're spending 5 months what should be a 1 month job these days.

Filed a compiler bug related to dwarf tables that screws up debugging and line of code coverage that they completely ignored, just because I mentioned that I had every LLM check it to confirm it's a bug, since all I know is what kcov and every coverage tool generates incorrect coverage data for my repo, for 100% certain.

Sounds like you violated the clearly stated project rules and admitted to it. Are you surprised that they're not engaging with you?

It's a violation of project rules to confirm bugs with AI?

Read it yourself: https://ziglang.org/code-of-conduct/

Wow I thought surely they wouldn't object to using AI to confirm bugs, but they really do.

Tbf I guess as a popular open source project not using AI to fix bugs, they probably already have more open bugs than they can ever fix so it doesn't really help them for people to find more.

I would imagine his bug was actually ignored just because Zig has 2700 open bugs, rather than some AI policy violation.

Claude Code has 13.4k open bugs: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues

Show me a popular open source project that doesn't have a large number of open issues and I'll show you one that has a triage bot auto-close them.

Can you offer any specifics? The ToC looks quite extensive, which to me indicates a lot of design decisions needed to be made (probably involving many people) and unclear how that process might be accelerated by AI.

Unless you're suggesting the language design should also be vibed together?

> Unless you're suggesting the language design should also be vibed together?

Sounds like a fun little project, have a bunch of AI pushers fork Zig and see if they can do a better job. I want to see results, not snarky HN comments. After all this progress, ChatGPT should be able to one-shot a better language since AI is so good now... right?

One-shot, no, but there are a bunch of people pretty much solo-building their personal ideal language with AI and it's going quite well. You need to know just enough about language design to be dangerous, but you don't need to be a seasoned pro.

I'm doing it myself: https://zena-lang.dev/

Claude can’t one-shot a C compiler.

None of these systems can. They need enormous training. They need alignment and reinforcement. They need harnesses. And most importantly they need a human that knows how to write and develop a C compiler.

The ISO specifications are not sufficient. Neither are the System V guidelines. Not even spec tests and compcert.

Yep, it's true, but the reality of what it would take to actually fork and commence with healthy use of AI alongside with the elusive soft/hard stance needed to lead technically and socially is probably a bigger challenge than anyone is willing to take on! Soo.. slow and (rather?) well it goes for Zig.

Slow and steady wins the race

Anthropic levels of slowness (pacing)?

in tech? really?

In programming languages, usually. Building software on top of a rapidly-changing language is not often a recipe for success.

Yes, the Lindy effect applies in tech too.

Im really enjoying using it, works great tbh

Seems to be C++ing which is disappointing. Looking more at C3 and Odin for cases where I'd hoped Zig to land.

Odin scratches this “stick shift” itch for me better than anything else. Highly recommended.