IMO on the official zig blog it just strategically makes sense to be non-polarizing - it would be far more persuasive to read a blog post that clinically lists off the many failings of Github on a purely technical level. Mentioning ICE and platform capitalism unnecessarily weakens your argument by making me think its a partially politically motivated decision. If I share your politics I guess that makes me agree with you more (but I would agree with you anyways). If I don’t share your politics then I discount your actual technical points.
In any event - I was really happy to read your post that shows you’re examining all of this with a critical eye - whatever conclusion you reach.
I hope Microsoft dies, so anything that goes in that direction even something small like shitting on GitHub is a win in my book. Everything they touch turns to shit. All that they do is make everything about computers and software development unnecessarily painful.
I disagree about GitHub. First of all, it’s open-source, and its creator was Linus Torvalds. You may not like Windows, but that’s beside the point.
I’m glad I got to know DOS, then WIN 3.1 ECT, OS2, and MAC… In short, today all that is forgotten, and yet with 256k we did amazing things, and with a 10GB hard drive, we were rich… And for more than 20 years, Linux. And I’m only talking about PCs here.
So when I discovered GitHub back then, it was great. Of course, Windows is looking to make money, but why not, as long as it doesn’t interfere with the fundamental reason why GitHub was created.
As for Codeberg, I saw it start up and I’m still there, but I say and maintain that when searching the site, it’s not very intuitive and doesn’t offer the convenience of GitHub.
As for the hosting issue, it’s viable.
I’m wary… The grass is always greener on the other side.
Recently, Git announced that it would change the default name of its “master” branch to “main” in version 3.0, scheduled for release at the end of 2026. Git is a decentralized version control system. It is free and open-source software, created in 2005 by Linus Torvalds, author of the Linux kernel, and distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2. Git has been maintained by Junio C Hamano since July 2005. Since the 2010s, it has been the most popular version control software in software and web development, used by 12 million people across all environments (Windows, Mac, Linux). Git is also the system behind the famous GitHub website, the largest host of computer code.
I’ll make it easy. Social concepts like capitalism or socialism are not the issue. Parasitic humans will abuse everything regardless of how you name it .
If I may offer my personal perspective on the communication style…
What I find amusing is that, while I am very much not like this when I communicate in English publicly, it actually is pretty close to how I communicate and think in Russian, and to my internal monologue (though, I usually use wood as a metaphor, not to insult primates…). Getting accustomed to “professional” style of communication was part of my transition from “a Russian student” to “part of the world’s developers community”.
Initially it felt Orwellian and double-speaky, to change my voice together with my language like that. It still feels! But I’ve grown to really value the ability to collaborate, in public, on shared goals, without necessary agreeing with people about the world in general. And I think “politically correct language” is a huge help here. It’s so easy to start a fight over words, so it makes sense to be extra cautions and to mask your authentic self, just so that you can work together. Beginning hypocrisy, if you will.
That being said, I feel like a culture of “inoffensive speech” sometimes gets carried forward too far, as there’s naturally a moving Overton window with respect to which words are acceptable to express “I strongly dislike this”, a treadmill of politeness. I also think it’s healthy to call a spade a spade, and that, in addition to speaker pledging to mellow their words, it is imperative for the listener to not use “tone is wrong” arguments to distract from substantial criticism. It is a fact of life that we all are sometimes wrong, and that getting called out on being wrong is inherently unpleasant, no matter the wording, but is better for everyone long-term.
I do value “Zig”'s communication style for its directness, I find it valuable if only because it is different. In addition to decentralization, I also feel that heterogeneity is a huge deal. While probably any community should have standards of acceptable behavior, I think it’s better if different communities have different standards, to see experimentally what works best in which context.
This is a very valid and true concern, and I also value and appreciate Zig’s authenticity and being true to it’s values. I’m not pledging for that to go away.
But when we communicate, we have the option of acknowledging the audience we’re talking to. I feel much safer pointing this out here than on x/twitter or a personal blog post, exactly because this audience has a common attitude that is receptive and friendly. Not everyone out there will have the same attitude. And as much as both of us would prefer a world where we can be more frank and direct, I fear it is not to our power to change that, at least not immediately.
More like the other way around, it was Github which made Git popular. This was around the time when Sourceforge started its enshittification process, and Github was at the right place at the right time as migration target - the underlying version control switch (from svn to git) was much less important than Sourceforge starting to get greedy and Github looking like a good free alternative at the time.
But yeah, in hindsight kinda interesting how history repeats itself
I have to disagree, I respect your nostalgia, and I can’t say I know that, and to some extent Microsoft is part of the reason i got into computer so much, I mean when I was 10 my glorious dual core windows vista computer kept blue screening on me, and I had weird issues, and that meant I spent way too much time trying to fix those issues.
But the point still stand, Microsoft makes really bad software in my opinion. Orders of magnitude slower than it has any right to be. They make confusing UI, bad documentation, they disrespect the user every step of the way, they shove AI and ads at every corner, and all of that to deliver software that for the most part, is not what you would expect from a multi trillion dollar company.
Windows terminal for example, is an absolute disgrace of a terminal, but if you think about it, a terminal should really be simple for a trillion dollar company, yet somehow they achieved something so slow, that it almost makes me regret Iterm2.
And if you look at it, they just make everything they touch worse, github, openAI, windows, previously great windows software that’s now bloated and feels like Ai slop. So yeah in my book they can rot in hell
Many here seem to think that you have to always write something uncontroversial. I disagree. I still miss the old Zig readme that was more ideological. I don’t necessarily understand and/or agree with every political sentiment you’ve ever expressed, but I respect that you have a reasoned and principled opinion. I don’t want you to censor yourself, nor try to appear more like something you aren’t. Why should we ask you to hide your real opinion behind corporate speak?
For me, one of the best things about the Zig Software Foundation is that it isn’t just a vassal of Microsoft or some other. You aren’t beholden to anyone. Say what you think! You are already a fairly non-offensive person.
I was once shocked and offended by one of your earliest talks, but guess what, I got over it. Luckily, I’m not emotionally stunted so that sort of thing happens.
This is reasonable and practical. In some VCSs, I have seen abusers using it as an image hosting service. An even more ridiculous case of abuse is company employees uploading movies they want to watch at work to npm in order to bypass the company’s access restrictions to websites other than npm.
Historically they actually produced quite good documentation (at least for their developer documentation like the Win32 API, at least compared to others) and often even translated it into different languages.
I once had a college (who is now retired) who worked as a developer for their entire life and was not able to even remotely understand English (and because of that the codebase used German for variable and function names).
But since Microsoft released their documentation also translated into German, this wasn’t a problem.
The tragedy is that under the hood Windows is really great technology for the most part, definitely competitive or superior to the Linux or macOS kernels. It’s mostly just the user-facing “marketing-driven” features where Microsoft ruins the whole product.
Yeah, that I can tell, because at least to me Windows feels the same speed as it was 15y ago, except my computer is orders of magnitude faster, so to me this doesn’t sounds like bad kernel, just like bad software put on top of it. but we are getting beside the point, I’m just happy that Zig is moving away from such a predatory company
…reminds me of that one big f*ckup with their German Visual Studio documentation I stumbled over: The MSVC LTCG feature (link time code generation) was translated as “Link Zeitcode Generierung” which confused and amused me to no end (they fixed it at some point though).
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