alt Hacker NewsNobody should feel insulted simply because a project decides to port its codebase to another language. It is a technical decision, not a personal attack.
Zig’s response has been a serious mistake. The TypeScript team ported the TypeScript compiler and language service from TypeScript to Go for TypeScript 7.0. Did anyone interpret that as the team insulting TypeScript itself? I certainly did not.
Replies
> Did anyone interpret that as the team insulting TypeScript itself?
No because Go and Typescript have wildly different use cases, and they explained in details the rationale for migrating the compiler, and why Go versus Rust. Their rationale makes sense, and did not throw Typescript under the bus (obviously).
They don’t care about the switch and it seems they’re actually happy with it. What they care about is the implied messaging that Zig has issues that the rewrite in Rust solved. Andrew highlighted that they had bad engineering practice, the rewrite did not solve anything, and they invested a lot of engineering with Rust to try getting things to work, engineering effort they have not invested in Zig.
Yes, why would Zig respond seriously to a company that has proven to have utter complete disdain towards humanity? Why would anyone be upset that a company is ruining workers lives, poisoning innocent civilians, and being used to kill school children?
That's just not fair!
I don't know, sometimes programming language choices seem to be in the realm of theology, not computer science or engineering.
What is more hurtful than somebody else making wrong religious choices?