Announcing The Zig Software Foundation
ziglang.org
ziglang.org
Founding a non-profit that deals with less than about US$10k a year is pretty easy, and seems worthwhile.
Go above that number (let alone up towards the levels where you can actually pay people to work full time on somethine), and you need a real board with real officers, and the board needs board insurance to imdemnify them against charges of financial malfeasance.
That was just the first complication I came across. After finding a couple more, I just gave up. I've love to have a "real" non-profit associated with Ardour, since that's entirely the way we conceive of the project, but the legal aspects to it when you're actually pulling in $100k a year or more just don't seem to justify the extra complications and requirements.
Today there are hundreds of student orgs running on Hack Club Bank, a few larger orgs (one with a budget of ~$100K/year, one that just signed on with anticipated budget of $1M/year), and now Hack Club HQ itself runs on Hack Club Bank (our finances are also open source on it - https://bank.hackclub.com/hq/).
While the page on Hack Club Bank on our website is still focused on student-led hackathons, we've recently started support for nonprofits not led by students. Perhaps it might be a good fit for Ardour?
"You have decided to establish the Document Foundation in Germany. Why should it become a foundation under German law?
A lot of people have asked whether it is necessary to establish the Document Foundation in Germany, because such a large amount of foundation capital is required here. In contrast, countries such as Great Britain or the United States offer similar legal constructs for a foundation without the requirement for a high foundation capital. The Steering Committee, after a thorough investigation, decided in a public telephone conference that the location of registration of the future foundation should ideally be Germany.
Germany is the best choice for the future foundation for several reasons: Not only do German foundations stand for security, stability, and trustworthiness, but Germany also has a large distribution of free and open source software. The roots of the product lie in Germany in the mid-1980s. In addition, Germany offers advantages in terms of taxes, tax deductibility for donors, as well as in terms of the foundation's activities, which are not restricted to a specific country from Germany.
Most importantly, many active members of the community who are willing to advance the Foundation are from Germany. Even if other countries would require fewer resources to set up the Foundation - if people who are willing to advance the Foundation are not on site, there would be higher costs for representatives and lawyers. Ultimately, however, a solid financial basis for the foundation would also be required in other countries."
Original source of the interview in German: https://ikhaya.ubuntuusers.de/2011/03/10/interview-mit-der-d...
Even so its nice to have a org like this for Zig, might even make me to try it out.
Can you please elaborate what are those?
Zig being better than Rust for targeting WASM is similar to C being better than C++ for that use case. High-level abstractions usually work against a minimal binary size, and WASM is a platform where the size of the 'executable' is very important.
Both C and Zig typically generate smaller binaries 'by default' by avoiding and discouraging high-level abstractions which are so fashionable now both in 'modern C++' and Rust.
Of course it is possible to create really small-sized binaries both in C++ and Rust if you're really careful and use an "embedded programming mindset", but this is not how those languages are taught, it's not the 'default' and you'll loose most of the high-level features that differentiate C++ and Rust from C or Zig anyway.
I wrote a blog post about that topic a while ago: https://floooh.github.io/2018/05/01/cpp-to-c-size-reduction....
This was when I just switched from using C++ to C as my 'default language', so that whole idea was quite new to me at the time, and that surprise is reflected in the blog post. In the meantime I have a better idea why higher level languages tend to cause bloated software, despite promising "zero cost abstractions".
"It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest." - Adam Smith
It's great that you're motivated by helping people. Sincerely. But most people aren't built that way. We get up on Monday morning to make a small circle of precious lives better, not just anyone's. Maybe it shouldn't be that way, but it is. Therefore reorganizing society around service rather than profit likely means a much smaller economy. To many people that's a feature.
It probably just means you get outcompeted by people who put profit first and can afford to pay their employees more competitive wages, invest higher amounts in Capex and R&D, and generally best you at running a firm.
Profit is the goal we're all maximizing for, like it or not. And greed is inherent to human being, which makes Capitalism the most successful economic system given that the inherently greedy efforts of an individual eventually creates prosperity for the collective (over a long enough time-horizon and with regulations aiming to prevent local maxima such a factory with 20-hour shifts)
It seems to me that we can't change greediness, and we can't change the fact that companies run on profit. What we can seem to change is customers' preferences. If we ingrain into people's mindsets that buying from companies that aim to serve the collective (seek the global maximum over local maxima), then we can nudge corporations to act on the behalf all of us rather than just its stakeholders
The arguments you're making are familiar to the gray-hairs in open source software. It was long predicted that our efforts would fade under competition with the Oracles and Microsofts of the world.
> Profit is the goal we're all maximizing for, like it or not.
You're not alone in your bubble, but you might want to peek outside of it once and a while.
> You're not alone in your bubble, but you might want to peek outside of it once and a while.
Nice shallow dismissal, but I'm talking about corporations, not "my bubble". By and large, they are maximizing for profit. And you're happy to have the goods and services they provide, and they provide more of those if they are profitable than if they aren't, so indirectly you are still hoping everyone profits.
Zig pleases my spartan sensibilities, and personally I'm delighted that it's forming a more durable arrangement without needless profiteering. Like the EFF and other open source foundations, there's a chance to good work, to make the world a better place, without ruthless profiteering.
Err, no. People want happiness, fulfilment, friendship, joy, meaning, safety, and a bunch of other things. Money can help obtain some (but not all) of those things, but it is instrumental in all cases.
> It seems to me that we can't change greediness, and we can't change the fact that companies run on profit.
Plenty of countries run system which are not optimised purely for profit. For example, Germany's corporations frequently act in the public good in ways that don't maximise their own profit. From my perspective, such countries seem to be doing much better than the US which is closer to being purely profit driven.
> It probably just means you get outcompeted by people who put profit first and can afford to pay their employees more competitive wages, invest higher amounts in Capex and R&D, and generally best you at running a firm.
This is a problem with our economic system, not a virtue, or even a necessary property.
> Capitalism the most successful economic system
Capitalism is only seen as successful because it has historically been competing with communism and feudalism. These are from the only possible economic systems. And given all its faults it seems far from likely that Capitalism is the best one.
However, I'd like to hear examples, which make you think German companies are any different in their greed than US ones.
Personally I think companies here are just as greedy and usually only do something non-profit oriented, if it is required by law or the publIc upset would mean bad business.
It's quite easy to show this is not true: if someone is selling a product or service and making $100,000 a year, and you offer them the opportunity to make $199,000 a year with the condition that half is locked away in an account they can never spend, just about nobody would take that offer.
As the blog post says, "The whole point of money is spending it to enrich your life and the lives of those around you. It’s a means to an end; it’s not the end in and of itself."
(You seem to understand this already when you suggest that customer preferences can be shifted - if it were true that we were all maximizing for profit, why on earth would someone buy, say, toothpaste for $4 from a company that claims to be doing good for the world when they could instead buy equally-functional toothpaste for $3?)
Then that's not really making $199,000 a year. They'd be making $99,500 which is less than the profit-maximizing scenario that pays $100,000
My point, and the point of the author of this blog post, is that nobody is motivated by "haha numbers go up." We're motivated by wanting to do things with our profit - our goal is not to accumulate money but to spend it (either now or in the future).
Maybe a better example is, if someone were making $100,000 now, and they had the opportunity to move to a country where they'd make $199,000 but the cost of living were twice as expensive, would they take it?
I don’t have an answer either way. But I’m inclined to question this idea that just because things are the way they are now means that is the way they always were and will always be. How many people would be happy to expand that “small circle of precious lives” they make better if they could, but can’t due to the fact that, modern life now is seemingly a tangle of actively contradicting incentives? And how many people would, if they knew others would provide for all their needs and wants, act as solely a parasite to the system that feeds them? And would it be a critical mass that makes the whole system untenable, or just a relatively small group of bad apples accounted for by the number of people who give more than they take?
Again, I don’t know the answer, and I do not pretend to. But I do think a blanket statement that more people are greedy than generous is more a commentary on modern politics - that maybe our current system of society forces people to behave that way - than the human condition.
I would say this one in particular is ill-posed. Paraphrasing hirundo, people are naturally generous toward a small circle of precious lives (and skeptical at best of the rest of the world). Asking about their attitude in general is meaningless.
Yes, that's a paraphrase of Hirundo's point. However, my point is that this assertion is by no means universally nor obviously a hard truth, and indeed still a large area of philosophical debate.
Or that's what an 18th century quote says. Several centuries of later evolutionary, psychological, and sociological research doesn't much agree...
Now the question I have, is it possible to create recurring revenue at a non-profit that is based of contracts with customers, or must all the revenue come from donations?
Sure. I once worked at a non-profit that provided educational material to schools on a subscription basis. There is a line somewhere, as eventually the non-profit starting providing additional services to those same schools that required them to keep a second set of books and pay taxes on those activities.
Yes definitely. The main difference from for-profits is that the revenue have to be spent towards the mission and not blindly creating more profit.
The butcher, the brewer, or the baker likely takes pride in the role he has in feeding and enriching families around him. But he's also got to feed his own. And the fact that there's money involved gets him to work on those days he'd -reaaaaally- rather not go. But money isn't enough to feel fulfilled in one's work.
And if you don't feel fulfilled in your work and your work's role in society: I'm sorry for you.
Out of curiosity, aren't there other languages designed with more appropriate expressiveness for your needs then? Julia, for example?
And wouldn't it be possible to create something very close to what you are asking for with a bit of comptime coding? Have the function work on a comptime decided type. I mean I get that you won't be able to use the operator symbols as names and you would lose infix syntax. Is those what you are after?
A control flow problem worth solving is understanding async and multithtreaded code.
And yes the expressiveness of actual infix operators is, to me, a strict requirement. The language is for humans, not machines after all, and stuff like add(mul(add(a, b), mul(a, c))) for, say, dual quaternion a, b, and c is a non starter. Most of my code would unfortunately become unreadable and there are often no sensible variable names for those intermediate results.
Zig supports C ABI, not C++ ABI.
And in the C++ community, doing exports for interop as "extern C" (in general, because many other languages prefer it) is accepted anyways. Would you make the choice to add that complexity?
That alone is already enough to stop most if not all foreign language interfaces from resolving a symbol to a function pointer. That's the simplest hurdle to overcome. There are also complex mechanisms to deal with such as virtual method tables that figure into the calling conventions of overridable methods. Not even C++ compilers manage to keep the ABI stable between every compiler version: sometimes libraries compiled with a new version cannot be used with software compiled by an old version. Rust doesn't even have an ABI specification yet.
That said, I do wish that there was a standardized way to expose vtables across foreign language boundaries. Although, I understand that differences in how vtables work across different languages, or even different implementations of the same language (cough cough c++ cough cough) would make creating a useful standard difficult.
The right way to do this is to support arithmetic operators for types that implement a specific interface.
btw, I know it's not as nice as first-class operator overloading, but Zig's comptime might enable writing DSLs for e.g. vector/matrix math: https://www.reddit.com/r/Zig/comments/g83h12/comment/foleoa8
Also I’ve heard that argument a ton. It’s total complete rubbish as far as I’m concerned. Extrapolating, if you see a function call, what really can you say about the “cost” of that function? To me, without actual investigation, the answer is zilch. The function might be inlined, in the i-cache, referencing a lazily loaded symbol. It might be a small function, it might be huge, it may flush the cache, idk. If the goal was to be able to estimate the performance at a glance, well, we should use assembly, and even then the performance isn’t always clear.
I would say at least two more years then.
https://github.com/ziglang/zig/wiki/FAQ#why-does-zig-force-m...
Hard tabs are not accepted by stage1 because:
- It doesn't need to. All of the self-hosted compiler source is formatted with zig fmt and so there are no hard tabs. The complexity of dealing with hard tabs need not be present in stage1.
- zig fmt is not fully stable yet; use of zig fmt is not yet ubiquitous. If stage1 accepted hard tabs, then in practice, there would be accidental mixing of tabs and spaces.
[1]: https://github.com/ziglang/zig/wiki/FAQ#why-does-zig-force-m... [2]: https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/544g
I don't see the need for a financial organization, other than my arguments. Sustainability is much better without another entity interfering.