* The author is being flippant and not taking the situation seriously enough.
* The author is presuming a high-trust audience that knows that they have done all the due diligence and don't have to restate all of that.
In this case, it's a devlog (i.e. not a "marketing post") for a language that isn't at 1.0 yet. A certain amount of "if you're here, you probably have some background" is probably reasonable.
The post does link directly to the PR and the PR has a lot more context that clearly conveys the author knows what they are doing.
It is weird reading about (minor) breaking language changes sort of mentioned in passing. We're used to languages being extremely stable. But Zig isn't 1.0 yet. Andrew and friends certainly take user stability seriously, but you signed up for a certain amount of breakage if you pick the language today.
As someone who maintains a post-1.0 language, there really is a lot of value in breaking changes like this. It's good to fix things while your userbase is small. It's maddening to have to live with obvious warts in the language simply because the userbase got too big for you to feasibly fix it, even when all the users wish you could fix it too. (Witness: The broken precedence of bitwise operators in C.)
It's better for all future users to get the language as clean and solid as you can while it's still malleable.
This was proposed, discussed, and accepted here: https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/3257
Later, Matthew Lugg made a follow-up proposal, which was discussed both publicly and in ZSF core team meetings. https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/15909
He writes:
> A (fairly uncontroversial) subset of this behavior was implemented in [the changeset we are discussing]. I'll close this for now, though I'll probably end up revisiting these semantics more precisely at some point, in which case I'll open a new issue on Codeberg.
I don't know how evident this is to the casual HN reader, but to me this changeset very obviously moves Zig the language from experimental territory a large degree towards being formally specified, because it makes type resolution a Directed Acyclic Graph. Just look at how many bugs it resolved to get a feel for it. This changeset alone will make the next release of the compiler significantly more robust.
Now, I like talking about its design and development, but all that being said, Zig project does not aim for full transparency. It says right there in the README:
> Zig is Free and Open Source Software. We welcome bug reports and patches from everyone. However, keep in mind that Zig governance is BDFN (Benevolent Dictator For Now) which means that Andrew Kelley has final say on the design and implementation of everything.
It's up to you to decide whether the language and project are in trustworthy hands. I can tell you this much: we (the dev team) have a strong vision and we care deeply about the project, both to fulfill our own dreams as well as those of our esteemed users whom we serve[1]. Furthermore, as a 501(c)(3) non-profit we have no motive to enshittify.
[1]: https://ziglang.org/documentation/master/#Zen
It's been incredible working with Matthew. I hope I can have the pleasure to continue to call him my colleague for many years to come.
This stuff is foundational and so it's certainly a priority to get it right (which C++ didn't and will be paying for until it finally collapses under its own weight) but it's easier to follow as an outsider when people use conventional terminology.
Thanks for your and the Zig team work.
Great to hear; I look forward to reading the language spec one day.
Indeed you don't ... perhaps you should have asked.
> I would assume
Generally a bad idea.
> which could have previously happened, IDK
Indeed you don't. Perhaps you should have asked.
Check the response from the language BDFN, Andrew Kelley.