Pledging Another $400k to the Zig Software Foundation
mitchellh.com203 points by tosh an hour ago
203 points by tosh an hour ago
It's great to be in a position to do this, however I'm beginning to think that their greater contribution is ghostty
I don't really know how to value things any more when I see someone develop a tool that is kind-of useful that then gets acquired for half a billion dollars. As someone with a decent number of decades of terminal hopping, the improvement that ghostty has brought a breath of fresh air. To me it has represented more utility that a few of those acquisitions.
What a word of wisdom right there, the bit about internet is beautiful because it's ok to be weird - this is often the opposite on twitter, fb, reddit and many discords where if you have a different opinion you get mobbed by angry comments making one feel worse about their own weirdness.
It must be pretty satisfying to be able to throw that kind of money at stuff you admire.
I really do not understand how people talk about "Being rich / being a billionaire will make you fundamentally unhappy". Damn if I had all the money I have so many good-willed projects I want to throw money at!
Money can't buy happiness, but it can buy less unhappiness. There's diminishing returns, of course, but I'd hazard it looks a bit like ln(n), in that the returns are quite significant in the beginning.
Money can very much buy happiness. Most of the things that make you unhappy can be remedied with money. How much money you need to accomplish that depends though.
And the remaining unhappinesses can end up in starker relief, as you continuously try to remove all unhappinesses from your life to nearly impossible and sometimes distorted degrees.
The problem isn’t that money doesn’t buy happiness, it’s that it can remove your ability to endure the necessary amounts of unhappiness in life.
It will not make you unhappy. It will just not make you happy. Big difference. The saying "money can't buy happiness" is in fact true no matter how much people want to rationalize the opposite.
What that always leaves out, however, is that no/little money can very much cause a lot of unhappiness.
A recent example: https://vinay.sh/i-am-rich-and-have-no-idea-what-to-do-with-...
> The saying "money can't buy happiness" is in fact true no matter how much people want to rationalize the opposite.
I'm willing to test this theory out, send me some money.
The kinds of people that become billionaires are not those who are happy, the hole in their sole is why they are billionaires in the first place. Yes there are exceptions, just like with everything.
You should probably have a billion dollars, you would do great things. But you probably shouldn't become a billionaire to get there. Being rich doesn't make one unhappy, but getting there does.
That relentless grind changes a person, much like the ring.
I echo the sentiment in this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48630565
Yeah I feel the same about people who say they wouldn't know what to do when they retire. I have so many projects! I guess we are just different...
Because the most vocal rich people in this age seem to have an unusual lack of empathy and just being able to enjoy themselves.
Yeah, I think people have the correlation backward. I suspect that driven people are more likely to get rich and less likely to be happy, so there seem to be a lot of angry rich dudes.
Meanwhile, people who get rich by accident often seem able to improve their own lives and those of others with their money. The recent article about the founder of Craigslist comes to mind.
Adults responding in adult ways. Respect.
I have been experimenting with modifying Ghostty lately. It's a well attended codebase and a pleasure to work with, props to Mitchell.
Since Ghostty is written in Zig, I ended up adding native Zig AST support in Dirac (https://github.com/dirac-run/dirac/blob/master/src/services/...)
One thing the has been a little unintuitive is the pattern of all code and tests in single files, which makes the filesizes grow much larger. Also if you're coming from inheritance supported languages, Zig forces a different way of thinking
Zig is really nice. I enjoy using it a lot. Glad to hear that it is getting a little more funding.
Major props to Mitchell (and his family) for these donations.
I'm not in the OSS world much so hopefully someone can help me understand: what does 700k buy you in OSS language development?
In the case of Zig, You can see their financial reports here:
https://ziglang.org/news/2025-financials/
Most of it goes to contributors.
Nothing more beautiful when game recognizes game.
I really appreciate the "it's okay to be weird" sentiment. It has never been easier to try out a crazy idea. We may as well embrace it and try to learn something.
> I use AI heavily. I've written about my AI adoption journey and shipping real features with AI assistance. I'm also quite vocal about remaining rational about its capabilities and frustrated with its negative impacts on open source.
> The point is that I have opinions. Those opinions don't fully align with ZSF's approach. And yet, I have nothing but respect for ZSF: the people, the policies, and the project. Part of what makes the internet and open source great is that projects can be weird and different. They can set unusual boundaries, build their own culture, and pursue quality in ways that won't make sense to everyone.
Mitchell does feel like the adult in the room when other people are having chain-saws and acting irrationally for a lack of better term (for example jared/bun controversy which the post just somewhat touches on)
(Mitchell's tweet about AI psychosis is genuinely influential and is now a pointer to what this phenomenon might be)
I really think him and simon's opinions are somehow decently nuanced opinions on AI that the internet has to offer.
Now glazing of mitchell aside, I am happy that zig foundation gets such amount of money and I am really excited that Zig an independent language is able to get the level of love that it does.
There is a famous talk by the creator of Elm on the economics of independent programming languages and how its hard for them to get sponsored if they aren't already working at a company (Rust was created at Mozilla, Golang was created by Google)
This is a real issue that is true for most of open-source and I am just happy that we are atleast moving slowly towards some good as well. Its an uphill battle with multiple lows but I am happy for the positive changes as it gets as open source does have a special place in my heart as it taught me about privacy and many of your hearts as well.
I read it as a pledge to continue doing non-AI-LLM-slop work. End result could be interesting for everyone, on one side project with no-LLM policy and on the other side projects which heavily rely on LLMs.
In the short term we might not see the benefits, this pledge reads like: "Please keep doing what you are doing now, I am interested in how far it goes" (not in any negative sense)
If I ever get "fuck you" money like Mitchell did, I plan to use his post-money life as an inspiration to "retire".
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Doesn't this prove that Mitchell Hashimoto is probably the only "good billionaire"?
I thought all billionaires were bad?
It's because you only hear about the loud ones. There are lots doing good work.
In particular Lauren Bezos and Laurene Powell Jobs.
Warren Buffet is essentially bequeathed the majority of his wealth to good causes.
A lot of the work of the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation is phenomenal (despite the recent and disturbing Epstein news).
George Soros has funded a lot of good causes, depending on how far you want to believe the conspiracy theories.
Harris Rosen funded free daycares and university tuition to benefit an impoverished Orlando community.
Dolly Parton's philanthropy is legendary.
A lot of the Robber barons (Andrew Carnegie, Rockefeller's) bequeathed to causes that Americans are still benefiting from today.
Yvon Chouinard, Founder of Patagonia, pretty much gave the company away for environmental causes.
Chuck Feeney pretty much gave away 99% of his wealth.
I guess it depends on exactly what you're talking about, but my impression is that the primary "billionaires are bad" argument is simply that a system that allows billionaires to exist is inherently broken. A system that rewards people based on their actual contributions would not allow billionaires to exist.
The fact that some billionaires use their money to do good does not contradict that argument.
I am sure there are some bad billionaires. That moniker is used to demonize them for the most part.
Another language that is in a similar space to Zig that I think deserves more attention, particularly for funding is Odin. While I think Zig is a great language, there is a consistency of design and simplicity to Odin that makes low-level programming more ergonomic and enjoyable to me. While Zig boasts a lot of impressive projects, Odin was used to build the JangaFX suite[1].