The discord community operates like a cult (sound familiar, Rust community?) and any criticisms or anything not exuberantly positive results in a flame war.
I saw all of that happen several times so far with the community and it's ultimately what drove me away from the project altogether.
You will find me to be quite open minded about criticism but you're not going to get very far by misquoting me.
I have an entire kanban board[1] dedicated to improving safety, and "security and correctness" are both properties of the word "robust" which is the very first adjective ziglang.org uses to describe the language.
I could spend 20 more minutes on HN debunking the claims in this thread, but instead of rewarding your behavior I'm going to give that time instead to the people who have opened pull requests on Zig and help them get their code merged.
can you be a bit more specific?
Another one I personally brought up was that the standard library's utf-8 module had a decoder that panics on invalid input sequences, certainly setting consumers up for DOS attacks with malformed utf-8 inputs. EDIT: DOS vulnerability is still there (https://github.com/ziglang/zig/blob/master/lib/std/unicode.z..., PR to fix that was closed https://github.com/ziglang/zig/pull/4929). I never responded to the PR because it was at that moment I decided to abandon Zig altogether.
The response to the latter was pretty much "the standard library isn't meant to be used right now", to which I really don't have a response. There was a very, very long and heated argument in the discord channel about it where instead of addressing the concerns about DOS and security I was instead insulted for apparently trying to taint an otherwise perfect language.
The community is vile and the few examples I've seen of the maintainer disregarding safety and security in this way don't give me any amount of confidence in the project overall.
EDIT: Worth mentioning, the syntax and semantics surrounding Zig are not new ideas. I'm sure another project will pop up at some point to compete; many discussions I've seen in the language design channels on IRC and a few discord servers have many people arriving at similar conclusions Zig has made, without knowing Zig even exists. I think we're slowly converging on a language that looks a lot like Zig, but I don't think Zig will be its ultimate incarnation.
Again, the frustration wasn't just from the PR alone - it was also the Discord flame war that ensued prior to the PR.
I usually find community overrated and I've made a conscious effort to separate it from technology for the most part. Zig as a language has certain values that it's built with in mind and those values for the most part are aligned with mine, so this is basically what keeps me interested in it. I would use Rust despite its community if it aligned with my values. I despise the leadership of Elixir and Phoenix but I still use both of those when it makes sense.
With all this said, the IRC channel is a lot less about memery and wild discussions (but also less active) than the Discord server, so if you feel like it you can always just pop into #zig on FreeNode if you have questions and would like to talk about the language.
I was always on the IRC though. It could be the discord community is less mature.
A response to a security concern should never be "fuck off".
It can be when it is out of context and/or out of proportion.
But it could be more likely that temperamentally you are disposed towards different programing language where security concerns must override any and every issue at hand.
The language is not yet production-ready for almost every production use-case, and that should not be a surprise to anybody that has looked into it a bit. We even had somebody make a "Using Zig in Production" talk that started with a few jokes on how he decided to do so despite Andrew publicly saying that it's too early.
Right now docs, tooling, the self-hosted compiler, making design decisions on corners of the language not yet finalized, getting more contributors, getting funding to speed up development (and give back to contributors), and building up the community are all needs with an immensely higher level of priority.
On the last point, the community, since that's my job, I'll spare a couple more words: "the" discord community doesn't exist. The Zig community is decentralized and anyone is free to start their own space, as stated in the Community wiki page of the project https://github.com/ziglang/zig/wiki/Community
So when it comes to Discord servers, at the moment of writing there are two listed in that document: the older, bigger one, and mine. You are probably talking about the bigger one, where I can see your discussions with other members. From what I can see in the logs, the discussions were calm and reasonable. I also don't see any of the insults that you refer to in your other comments. In case I missed them though, you'd need to raise the problem with the moderators of that space, and not chalk it up to 'the community' being a cult. This is very different compared to how Rust runs its communities btw.
I'm sorry, but from what I can gather in your case you simply had strong opinions on specific topics and other people just disagreed with you, partially for design (i.e. non strictly technical) reasons. From what I can see from your other comments in this thread, my only recommendation is to work on being more dispassionate when approaching a new community and when issuing PRs (btw a good way of avoiding doing useless work is to open an issue first or to find Andrew / other core contributors on IRC and get their opinion). At the end of the day Zig is an opinionated project where Andrew gives the final approval on what the language should or should not be. By missing that nuance, you built up expectations that in the end were unmet, resulting in understandable frustration.
That said, from my PoV, this doesn't justify excessive criticism of Zig and its community.
As for debating changes and raising criticism, we do that too, but to do that successfully you need to understand more the nuances in the history and design of Zig.
https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/6600 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=880uR25pP5U
Therefore when setting priorities for language evolution it seems better to identify work that is less likely to result in breaking code, and prioritise safety over that.
Please read Andrew's answer and check the linked project management dashboard on GH.