Zig Foundation Fundraiser 2024

Andrew is pleading for donations to the Zig Foundation to pay for continued Zig development. See https://ziglang.org/ for details.

I, for one, increased my github sponsorship to $25/month. Hope it helps.

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Here’s the accompanying financial report as well:
https://ziglang.org/news/2024-financials/

Seriously, does anyone know of any other FOSS Foundation that makes extra effort to be so transparent about their finances? I mean, recording the sources of income as well as the decisions that led to allocating those resources for one thing or other. Seems like at least every 501(c)(3) non-profit should feel accountable to do it, but I haven’t come across any such statements anywhere else.

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I always thought that the best way you can help an open source project is to donate your time, so that’s what I did with Zig a while back.

Later, I found myself no longer able to reliably contribute my time, so I fell back to the second best way to help: donate money. I am sponsoring the project and matching contributions via my employer, so that I can 2x my impact on Zig’s success.

Zig is no longer a hobby project, it’s a mature project with a large community around it. If everyone pitched in even a small amount, achieving the ZSF donation targets would be easy. If you think Netflix deserves 15€/month, don’t you think Zig deserves at least a third of that? :innocent:

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Yup, it’s that time to call for more supporters.

As systems grow, there’s more to be maintained and updated when things change. Growth comes with its own cost.

Github sponsors are their second biggest source of income. Small but recurring donations make a huge difference. So, for anyone reading this who isn’t currently a sponsor, I encourage you to consider becoming one. It all adds up.

Even the Ziggit forum has 5x the number of users that it did last year (and I’ve seen more new users recently than ever before). So, if you’ve found this forum to be helpful and you’re not a sponsor, it’s a good time to consider becoming one :slight_smile:

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I want to call out that Zig applicability scope is wider than just Systems Programming. I am testing Zig in Machine Learning / AI space as an HPC language for core algorithms that can then be exposed to end-user via Python C-FFI. Zig’s comptime offers cleaner path creatings python modules compared to C/C++. There is a promising project in this area ziggy-pydust which is somewhat muted recently but I hope active development will pick up again.

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Hey everybody there’s just one day left in the ZSF fundraiser and it’s so close to reaching the goal! So don’t think twice and donate to keep Zig independent, alive and thriving!

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Thanks everyone. That concludes the fundraiser for this year.

Final stats:

We raised 25980 USD in one-time donations and 4715 USD monthly recurring.

In terms of billable hours that comes out to a pool of 433 hours plus a sustained 78 hours per month (18 hours per week).

So now it’s time to put those hours to good use. Mostly this will be used to offer Jacob Young as much billable time as possible without risking ZSF bank balance getting too low.

You might recognize his name for being largely responsible for taking the C backend as well as x86 backend from experimental status to being actually usable in practice.

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