If your team is in charge of critical production systems, it might be too early for you to use Zig.
Zig is v0 precisely because it’s unfinished work. You need to keep your expectations aligned with the current state of the project (and its current development trajectory), otherwise you will build up expectations that the Zig project won’t be able to meet.
In this instance, you are describing this bug as one of “dire importance”, but that’s not the same level of priority for the Zig project because we have limited manpower and a very large scope to cover, which means that there are plenty of other bugs of comparable severity (see the whole RLS vs PRO thing for example, or miscompilations) .
More importantly, for the Zig project the goal is not to create a maximally usable v0.11.x Zig, but to have a smooth developer experience in order to create a maximally usable Zig v1. This does mean keeping Zig usable in the short term, but work prioritization follows the needs of those who do the work, not the needs of some “beta” users.
That said, some companies have invested in Zig and we do care about not regressing their use cases. Uber for example has a support contract with the ZSF that does make us prioritize bugs that they report.
(we also have something vaguely similar for relevant Zig projects, but that seems a bit outside the scope of this discussion)
So this is my advice wrt advocating for Zig in your company:
- Make abundantly clear to everybody involved that Zig is unstable software. It is usable, but it is not yet a battle tested, reliable tool. Using Zig seriously means being willing to participate in its development process one way or another (eg by reporting bugs).
- Learn how development of Zig happens, our financial structure and design philosophy.
- (optional) Setup a meeting between your team and me so I can answer any question that the materials available on the internet can’t.
- If your company vibes with the way we do things and concludes that it has more to gain than to lose by using Zig in its current incomplete state, then consider asking the ZSF for a support contract in order to further de-risk your technological choice.
This, in my opinion, is the only correct way of bringing a v0 technology to a company. Anything else is a highway to disappointment.