>When I read the post, my first thought was that I wouldn’t want to build things in Zig, because any technical decision I make, good or bad, might subject me to this kind of article from their BDFL.

I think it is worse than that, the comments from people in threads about this suggest that this is an attitude that is creeping into the community. They may not be a majority, but if kinder souls decide to leave for a more welcoming community, the remainder will be more concentrated.

> The bigger problem with the post is that it talks out of both ends of the mouth: it’s clearly meant as a personal attack, but also insists that it isn’t.

my instinct is to step up and defend Andrew: to say that truly, he has strong opinions -- which is to say he _cares_ about doing things right -- but that he's more patient and accommodating than you're judging him to be from this 10,000ft view.

that's kinda weird: you might view this as a personal attack _from_ Andrew against Bun and i might view the reactions as personal attacks _against_ Andrew. viewing it through this lens without our preconceptions ought to make either both parties or neither party look bad, i think? i don't know the solution except to highlight the outsized impact that our individual preconceptions play when judging a situation from 10,000ft away.

If you don't intend to write misleading stuff that makes Zig look bad when you leave and if you avoid ghosting the Zig foundation in scheduled meetings you had with them, I suppose you should be good.

It might be helpful to read the latest revision of Andrew's post, which may address this concern for you. It received several revisions: https://github.com/andrewrk/andrewkelley.me/commits/master/p...

I appreciate having an opinion vs a bunch of safe words saying nothing. Most CEO communication probably isn't even written by them and has a person-less touch.

It's totally fine to get a negative reaction and avoid the project. It's called having human emotions, which is actually healthy. Getting feedback is how you learn and grow as a person.

> I can’t conceive of the leadership of the Python or Rust or any other community I’ve ever worked with doing something like that.

At least for Rust, part of this is because there is no BDFL, by design. Python has moved away from the BDFL model as well, IIRC. Individual contributors can get mad and write angry personal attacks, but there’s no face of the language like there is with Zig.

> I can’t conceive of the leadership of the Python or Rust or any other community I’ve ever worked with doing something like that.

I'd be prudent to use a clear faux-pas by a BDFL as an argument to push for an alternative, seemingly more consensual, leadership style. I'd also be careful to fall for the apparent lack of overt aggression in the latter type of structures, as a necessarily positive signal. I've seen people in various such communities (including the two cited languages) that have chosen not to interact with their steering committees, because of perceived toxicity.

This can and does happen with any kind of structure and can take many shapes, some of whom are too subtle or passive to even accurately pinpoint, in the way you would for example directly index a BDFL. In The Tyranny of Structurelessness Jo Freeman made the case that the lack of a clear structure in the make up of a movement presents with opportunities for very fuzzy power dynamics and related abuses that are also much more challenging to deal with.

Andrew didn't make the hit piece out of nowhere, unprovoked.

Jared, using Anthropic's multi-billion dollar microphone, painted Zig in a bad light with their first (denied) attempt to merge a vibecoded PR to improve Zig's build times.

Then very shortly after that failed attempt, about 11 days later I gather, Jared (again with help from Anthropic's very big microphone) made public the Zig-to-Rust port.

So unless you're planning on getting acquihired by Anthropic _and_ planning on porting away from Rust using their tools very publicly, I think you'll be safe from such pieces.

This is not just a random blog post or technical decision, it’s literally a trillion dollar company’s marketing department deciding to attack and slander Zig.

Insane that people + tokens are slobbering to rush to Clownthropic’s defense when the whole migration and subsequent blog post was just sour grapes about the Zig project’s no slop policy.

And this is a warning shot from Anthropic intended to have a chilling effect, we have tens of billions of dollars at our disposal and if you take any stance we don’t like that undermines our narrative we will fuck with your shit and throw billions of dollars of muscle at rewriting you or trying to make you irrelevant.

I had this exact same reaction. Agreeing with the substance of the critique of approach etc but not at all its tone nor of the underlying elitism that lays there.

This is not how professionals behave in a profession.

Decorum actually matters.

Anthropic is doing bad stuff. They clearly have a broken internal engineering culture. Hence I don't use their products. But I expect to see this laid out in a structured argumentation that doesn't go after people and their personalities.

Everyone is motivated. It seems to me that Anthropic went out fishing for something to blow up. As Ray puts it: "Management eagerly approved the Rust rewrite option because it was a great marketing opportunity to showcase their new Fable model, Anthropic already uses Rust, and Zig is openly against using Anthropic’s products." Sounds spot on.

Others have pointed to some plausible technical benefits from the port, namely that it forces an enumeration of unsafe code boundaries. There's probably something to that, but the big idea is that Anthropic bet that its models could do a big job, and they needed to both demonstrate that and make hay of it. Everything aligned. They did the port. The artisans might call it slop, but it runs, they did it like 2 weeks, and they stuck it to the guy that shuns AI.

If you're the type of manager who picks farming out work to a body shop with 100 unskilled workers instead of hiring 2 legitimate FTEs, then this is speaking your language.

To me it's just highlighting the reality -- Anthropic fired the first shots. I think it's reasonable for people to say, hey, if you're going to trash the reputation of Zig (in a pretend-objective way) then it's entirely fair for people to put in important context that Bun was not written well.