Zig quits GitHub, says Microsoft's AI obsession has ruined the service
theregister.com
theregister.com
> [2025-11-27T02:10:07Z] it’s abundantly clear that the talented folks who used to work on the product have moved on to bigger and better things, with the remaining losers eager to inflict some kind of bloated, buggy JavaScript framework on us in the name of progress [1]
> [2025-11-27T14:04:47Z] it’s abundantly clear that the talented folks who used to work on the product have moved on to bigger and better things, with the remaining rookies eager to inflict some kind of bloated, buggy JavaScript framework on us in the name of progress [2]
> [2025-11-28T09:21:12Z] it’s abundantly clear that the engineering excellence that created GitHub’s success is no longer driving it [3]
---
1: https://web.archive.org/web/20251127021007/https://ziglang.o...
2: https://web.archive.org/web/20251127140447/https://ziglang.o...
3: https://web.archive.org/web/20251128092112/https://ziglang.o...
It would appear they listened to that feedback, swallowed their ego/pride and did what was best for the Zig community with these edits. I commend them for their actions in doing what's best for the community at the cost of some personal mea culpa edits.
If everyone is always bad regardless if they're trying to change, what incentives would they have from changing at all? It doesn't make any sense.
The reason why the latter stance is often popularized and cheered is because it is often harder to do, especially in the adverse conditions, when not changing your opinion has a direct cost of money or time or sanity or in rare cases even freedom. Usually it involves small human group or individual against a faceless corporation, making it even harder. Of course we should respect people standing against corporation.
PS: this is not applicable if they are "clearly wrong" of course.
If no one hates what you are doing chances are you're not doing anything really
Because this plays into a weird flaw in cognition that people have. When people become leaders because they are assholes and they are wrong, then after the wind blows the other way they see the light and do a mea culpa, there is always a certain segment that says that they're even more worthy to be a leader because they have the ability to change. They yell at the people who were always right that they are dogmatic and ask "why should people change their minds if they will be treated like this?"
If one can't see what's wrong with this toy scenario that I've strawmanned here, that's a problem. The only reason we ever cared about this person is because they were loud and wrong about everything. Now, we are expected to be proud of them because they are right, and make sure that they don't lose any status or position for admitting that. This becomes a new reason for the people who were previously attacking the people who were right to continue to attack the people who were right, who are also now officially dogmatic puritans whose problem is that they weren't being right correctly.
This is a social phenomenon, not a personality flaw in these leaders. People can be wrong and then right. People can not care either way and latch onto a trend for attention or profit, and follow it where it goes. I don't think either of these things are in and of themselves morally problematic. The problem is that there are people who are simply following individual personalities and repeating what they say, change their minds when that personality changes their mind, and whose primary aim is to attack anyone who is criticizing that personality. They don't really care about the issue in question (and usually don't know much about it), they're simply protecting that personality like a family member.
This, again, doesn't matter when the subject is stupid, like some aesthetic or consumer thing He used to hate the new Batman movies but now he says that he misunderstood them; who cares. But when the subject is a real life or death thing, or involves serious damage to people's lives and careers, it's poisonous when a vocal minority becomes dedicated to this personality worship.
It's so common that there now seems to be a pipeline of born-agains in front of everything, giving their opinion. Sir, you were a satanist until three years ago.
(He did post a kind of vague apology in https://ziggit.dev/t/migrating-from-github-to-codeberg-zig-p..., but it's ambiguous enough that anyone who was offended is free to read it as either retracting the offending accusation, or not. This is plausibly the best available alternative for survival in the current social-media landscape, because it's at best useless to apologize to a mob that's performatively offended on behalf of people they don't personally know, and usually counterproductive because it marks you as a vulnerable victim, but the best available alternative might still tend to weaken the kind of integrity we're talking about rather than strengthen it.)
I don't think there's really an obligation to announce to newcomers, "hey, an earlier version of this post was overly inflammatory." But you should be forthright about your mistake to people who confront you about it, which is what's happening in the forum thread you linked. I think this is all fine.
I think developers here are probably perfectly innocent about these changes. The product mangers have to push for this integration or get replaced. This has been a theme at Microsoft for quite a while.
I find the fact that this painting has been hung crooked by 0.00001º: down
I find torture and mass murder: down
Clearly this is a ridiculous state of affairs. There's more gradations available than this.
Possibly coloured by my dutch culture: I think this rewrite is terrible. The original sentence was vastly superior, though I think the first rewrite (newbies to rookies) was an improvement.
The zig team is alarmed, and finds this state of affairs highly noteworthy and would like to communicate this more emotional, gut instincty sense in their words.
There's a reason humans invent colourful language and epithets. They always do, in all languages. Because it's useful!
And this rewrite takes it out. That's not actually a good thing. The fact that evidently the internet is so culturally USA-ised that any slightly colourful language is instantly taken as a personal affront and that in turn completely derails the entire debate into a pointless fight over etiquitte and whether something is 'appropriate' is fucking childish. I wish it wasn't so.
In human communication, the US is somewhat notorious in how flattened its emotional range is of interaction amongst friendly folk. One can bring anthropology into it if one must: Loads of folks from vastly different backgrounds all moving to a vast expanse of land? Given that cultural misunderstanding is extremely likely and the cost of such a misunderstanding is disastrously high, best plaster a massive smile on your face and be as diplomatic as you can be!
Consider as a practical example: Linus Torvalds' many famed communications. "NVidia? Fuck you!" was good. It made clear, in a very, very pithy way, that Linus wasn't just holding a negative opinion about the quality and behaviour of the nvidia gfx driver team at the time, but that this negative opinion was universal across a broad range of concerns and extremely so. It caused a shakeup where one was needed. All in 3 little words.
(Possibly the fact that the internet in general is even more incapable of dealing with colourful language is not necessarily the fault of USification of the internet: The internet is a lot like early US, at least in the sense that the risk of cultural misunderstanding is far higher than in face to face communications on most places on the planet).
I appreciate that Andrew and the other Zig team members are really passionate about their project, their goals, and the ideals behind those goals. I was dismayed by the recent news of outbursts which do a lot to undermine their goals. That they’re listening to feedback and trying to take the high road (despite feeling a lot of frustration with the direction industry is taking) should be commended.
This is not a group with community or pragmatism from the start.
much better to put a colon in a filename, or call part of your toolchain "aux.exe"
https://help.interfaceware.com/v6/windows-reserved-file-name...
works like a treat
Indeed. The article even links to it.
https://ziggit.dev/t/migrating-from-github-to-codeberg-zig-p...
They sugarcoated the truth to a friendlier but less accurate soundbite is what they did.
Have people already forgotten that the ReactJS port made github slow ? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44799861
The revised, politically-correct, sanitized re-framing that you apparently insist on does not convey this very important point of information.
We have freedom of speech for a reason - blunt honesty conveys important information. Passive language does not.
I mean, reason of "we don't want to be tied with direction MS takes" is good enough, not sure why they felt need to invent reasons and nitpick some near irrelevant things just to excuse their actions
The big problem still remains: corporations control WAY too much in general.
If they would own up to it and say sorry, then your point stands. But that's not what happened here.
[1] https://ziggit.dev/t/migrating-from-github-to-codeberg-zig-p...
A reasonable person that's acting maliciously can be reasoned to stop their behavior.
An unreasonable person that's acting in good faith cannot be reasoned to stop their behavior because they are stupid.
If after attempts to reason with the unreasonable fail, it is not an insult or ad hominem attack to explain the person is acting stupidly.
That can not be absolutely true.
Thus spake zarathustra etc etc..
You need that middle-finger-to-everyone, "let me show you how it's really done" energy to build anything meaningful. Pretty much all the great builders I can think of in tech history are/were deeply angry people.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46114083
"I think that writing style is more LinkedIn than LLM, the style of people who might get slapped down if they wrote something individual.
Much of the world has agreed to sound like machines."
Eg,metaphors that make no sense or fail to contribute any meaningful insight or extrenely cliched phrases ("it was a dark and stormy night...") used seriously rather than for self-deprecating humor.
My favorite example of an AI tell was a youtube video about serial killers i was listening to for background noise which started one of its sentences with "but what at first seemed to be an innocent night of harmless serial murder quickly turned to something sinister."
It's just much easier now for "laypeople" to also adjust their style to this. My prediction is people will get quickly tired of it (as evidenced by your comment)
Companies do public announcement with the risk of getting sued left and right. Normal people chose careful words in public. In the Internet it seems different rules apply in public. Laypeople are not adjusting to corporate talk, laypeople are more and more aware of the public of the Internet and behave accordingly (most are, like in real life, mute)
> More importantly, Actions is created by monkeys ...
vs
> Most importantly, Actions has inexcusable bugs ...
I commend the author for correcting their mistakes. However, IMHO, an acknowledgement instead of just a silent edit would have been better.
Anyway, each to their own, and I'm happy for the Zig community.
Companies with heaps of cash are (over)paying "software engineers" to create and maintain it
Millions of people, unable to disable it, are "active users"
When I use Github servers I only use them to download source code, as zipballs or tarballs. I don't run any JS
The local forward proxy skips the redirects when downloading
http-request set-path %[path,regsub(/blob/,/raw/,g)] if { hdr(host) github.com }
http-request set-path %[path,regsub(/releases/tag/,/releases/expanded_assets/,g)] if { hdr(host) github.com }
Code folding is buggy. Have some functions that have inner functions or other foldable stuff like classes with methods and inside the method maybe some inner function? It will only show folding buttons sporadically, seemingly without pattern.
Also standard text editing stuff like "double click and drag" no longer properly works without issues/has weird effects and behavior. The inspection of identifiers interferes with being able to properly select text.
The issue search is stupid too, often doesn't find the things one searches for.
You must be logged in to search properly too.
Most of the functionality is tied to running that JavaScript.
In short, it shows typical signs of a platform that is more and more JavaScriptianized with bloated frameworks making things work half-assed and not properly tested for sane standard behavior.
But there is more. Their silly AI bots closing issues. "State bot". "Dependabot". All trash or half thought out annoying (mis-)features. Then recently I read here on HN, that apparently a project maintainer can edit another person's post! This reeks of typical Microsoft issues with permissions to do things and not properly thinking such a thing through. Someone internally must be pushing for all this crap.
Not to say their implementation doesn't suck. I just wouldn't know because even a non-buggy one would probably still be a subpar experience.
It is almost like getting someone else to proofread it since my mind isn’t as good at filling in the blanks like it is when looking at the code in the editor I wrote it in.
Linux seems to be doing fine.
I wouldn't personally care either way but it is non-obvious to me that the first version would actually hurt the community.
In this case, the unnecessary insults detract from the otherwise important message, and reflect poorly on Zig. They were right to edit it.
> This week people in our community confronted me about my lifetime of not understanding emotions. My flippant attacks in emails have been both unprofessional and uncalled for.
> Especially at times when I made it personal. In my quest for a better patch, this made sense to me. I know now this was not OK and I am truly sorry. The above is basically a long-winded way to get to the somewhat painful personal admission that hey, I need to change some of my behavior, and I want to apologize to the people that my personal behavior hurt and possibly drove away from kernel development entirely.
> I am going to take time off and get some assistance on how to understand people's emotions and respond appropriately.
He took time off and he’s better now. What you call “political correctness” is what I and others call “basic professionalism”. It took Linus 25 years to understand that. I can only hope that the people who hero worshipped him and adopted a similar attitude can also mature.
Not at all, but this reads like childishness rather than political correctness.
The normalization, in fact, has been quite successful. The entire silicon valley has tacitly approved of it.
You act like people arn't being rewarded for this type of behavior.
To me this kind of communication says it comes from a real person who has real experiences, not the marketing department, and is understandably angry at the people who make his life worse. And it's natural to insult those people. Insults are a signal, not noise. They signal something is wrong and people should pay attention to it.
I hear criticisms about being unprofessional and the like. So what? I don't wanna live in a world where everything everyone says is supposed to be filtered to match some arbitrary restrictions made up be people who more often than not can't do the work themselves.
Almost all of the actually competent people I personally know speak like this.
They can't stand those dragging us down through incompetence. They get angry when something that should work doesn't. They are driven by quality and will not be silent when it's lacking. If somebody fucked up, they will tell them they fucked up and have to fix it.
And I much prefer that approach.
I was saddened to see how they ganged up to bully the author of the Zig book. The book author, as far as I could tell, seems like a possibly immature teenager. But to have a whole community gang up on you with pitch forks because they have a suspicion you might use AI... that was gross to watch.
I was already turned off by the constant Zig spam approach to marketing. But now that we're getting pitchfork mobs and ranty anti-AI diatribes it just seems like a community sustaining itself on negative energy. I think they can possibly still turn it around but it might involve cleaning house or instituting better rules for contributors.
What makes you say that? Couldn’t it be an immature adult?
> because they have a suspicion you might use AI
Was that the reason? From what I remember (which could definitely be incomplete information) the complaint was that they were clearly using AI while claiming no AI had been used, stole code from another project while claiming it was their own, refused to add credit when a PR for that was made, tried to claim a namespace on open-vsx…
At a certain point, that starts to look outright malicious. It’s one thing to not know “the rules” but be willing to fix your mistakes when they are pointed out. It’s an entirely different thing to lie, obfuscate, and double down on bad attitude.
Your assumption is woefully incorrect. People were annoyed, when the explicit and repeated lie that the AI generated site he released which was mostly written by AI, was claimed to be AI free. But annoyed isn't why he was met with the condemnation he received.
In addition to the repeated lies, there's the long history of this account of typosquatting various groups, many, many crypto projects, the number of cursor/getcursor accounts, the license violation and copying code without credit from an existing community group (with a reputation for expending a lot of effort, just to help other zig users), the abusive and personal attack editing the PR asking, for nothing but crediting the source of the code he tried to steal. All the while asking for donations for the work he copied from others.
All of that punctuated by the the fact he seems to have plans to typo squat Zig users given he controls the `zigglang` account on github. None of this can reasonable be considered just a simple mistake on a bad day. This is premeditated malicious behavior from someone looking to leach off the work of other people.
People are mad because the guy is a selfish asshole, who has a clear history of coping from others, being directly abusive, and demonstrated intent to attempt to impersonate the core ziglang team/org... not because he dared to use AI.
I do think that it was weird to focus on the AI aspect so much. AI is going to pollute everything going forward whether you like it or not. And honestly who cares, either it is a good ressource for learning or it’s not. You have to decide that for yourself and not based on whether AI helped writing it.
However I think some of the critique was because he stole the code for the interactive editor and claimed he made it himself, which of course you shouldn’t do.
? what? from my experience zig marketing is pretty mid. it is nowhere at the level of rust.
heck, rust evangelism strikeforce made me hate rust and all the people promote it, even for now.
Zig people want Zig to "win". They are appearing on Hacker News almost every day now, and for that purpose this kind of things matters more than the language's merits themselves. I believe the language has a good share of merits though, far more than Rust, but it's too early and not battle tested to get so much attention.
we need less self censorship, not more.
It's not a binary choice between insults (escalates conflict, destabilizes rational decision making) vs hiding your opinions. That's what the word tact is for. It's simply, quite literally, a skill issue if someone can't find a middle ground between those two failure modes.
GitHub is critical infrastructure for many projects and pushing AI slop is not acceptable.
They have the money to pay for quality development time.
[0] https://www.whitehouse.gov/articles/2025/03/yes-biden-spent-...
All in one, that's why developers like it so much. The obsession with AI makes me nervous, but the advantages still outweigh, as for me, the average developer. For now.
Things like number of stars on a repository, number of forks, number of issues answered, number of followers for an account. All these things are powerful indicators of quality, and like it or not are now part of modern software engineering. Developers are more likely to use a repo that has more stars than its alternatives.
I know that the code should speak for itself and one should audit their dependencies and not depend on Github stars, but in practice this is not what happens, we rely on the community.
I have no idea what the parent comment is talking about a "well-formed CI system." GitHub Actions is easily the worst CI tool I've ever used. There are no core features of GitHub that haven't been replicated by GitLab at this point, and in my estimation GitLab did all of it better. But, if I put something on GitLab, nobody sees it.
As for me, this does not negate the convenient things that I originally wrote about.
The previous popular free code hoster was Sourceforge, which eventually entered its what's now called "enshittifcation phase". Github was simply in the right place at the right time to replace Sourceforge and the rest is history.
I hate that this is perceived as generally true. Stars can be farmed and gamed; and the value of a star does not decay over time. Issues can be automatically closed, or answered with a non-response and closed. Numbers of followers is a networking/platform thing (flag your significance by following people with significant follower numbers).
> Developers are more likely to use a repo that has more stars than its alternatives.
If anything, star numbers reflect first mover advantage rather than code quality. People choosing which one of a number of competing packages to use in their product should consider a lot more than just the star number. Sadly, time pressures on decision makers (and their assumptions) means that detailed consideration rarely happens and star count remains the major factor in choosing whether to include a repo in a project.
In non-coding social circles, social proof is even more accepted. So, I think that for a large portion of codebases, social proof is enough.
They're NOT! Lots of trashy AI projects have +50k stars.
Hahahahahahahahahahahaha...
??? Seriously?
> All these things are powerful indicators of quality
Not in my experience....
having used gerrit 10 years ago there's nothing about github's PRs that I like more, today.
> code navigation simply in a web browser
this is nice indeed, true.
> You write code, and almost everything works effortlessly.
if only. GHA are a hot mess because somehow we've landed in a local minimum of pretend-YAML-but-actually-shell-js-jinja-python and they have a smaller or bigger outage every other week, for years now.
> why developers like it so much
most everything else is much worse in at least one area and the most important thing it's what everyone uses. no one got fired for using github.
I've used Gerrit years ago, so wasn't totally unfamiliar, but it was still awkward to use when Go were using it for PRs. Notably that project ended up giving up on it because of the friction for users - and they were probably one of the most likely cases to stick to their guns and use something unusual.
I love patch stack review systems. I understand why they're not more popular, they can be a bit harder to understand and more work to craft, but it's just a wonderful experience once you get them. Making my reviews work in phabricator made my patchsets in general so much better, and making my patchsets better have improved my communication skills.
It's fine for code review in a team, not really good in GH-like "a user found a bug, fixed it, and want to send it" contribution scheme
Man :| no. I genuinely understand the convenience of using Actions, but it's a horrible product.
Am I missing a truly better alternative or CI systems simply are all kind of a pita?
Every time.
It feels to me like people have become way too reliant on this (in particular, forcing things into CI that could easily be done locally) and too trusting of those runners (ISTR some reports of malware).
>In addition, it is best to use code navigation simply in a web browser.
I've always found their navigation quite clunky and glitchy.
IMHO the vanilla Github UI sucks for code browsing since it's incredibly slow, and the search is also useless (the integrated web-vscode works much better - e.g. press '.' inside a Github project).
> as well as a well-formed CI system with many developed actions and free runners
The only good thing about the Github CI system are the free runners (including free Mac runners), for everything else it's objectively worse than the alternatives (like Gitlab CI).
GitHub's evolution as a good open source hosting platform stalled many years ago. Its advantages are its social network effects, not as technical infrastructure.
But from a technology and UX POV it's got growing issues because of this emphasis, and that's why the Zig people have moved, from what I can see.
I moved my projects (https://codeberg.org/timbran/) recently and have been so far impressed enough. Beyond ideological alignment (free software, distaste for Microsoft, want to get my stuff off US infrastructure [elbows up], etc.) the two chief advantages are that I could create my own "organization" without shelling over cash, and run my own actions with my own machines.
And since moving I haven't noticed any drop in engagement or new people noticing the project since moving. GitHub "stars" are a shite way of measuring project success.
Forgejo that's behind Codeberg is similar enough to GitHub that most people will barely notice anyways.
I'm personally not a fan of the code review tools in any of them (GitLab, Foregejo, or GitHub) because they don't support proper tracking of review commits like e.g. Gerritt does but oh well. At least Foregejo / Codeberg are open to community contribution.
How do you define "code navigation"? It might've got a bit easier with automatic highlighting of selected symbols, but in return source code viewer got way too laggy and, for a couple of years now, it has this weird bug with misplaced cursors if code is scrolled horizontally. I actually find myself using the "raw" button more and more often, or cloning repo even for some quick ad-hoc lookups.
Edit: not to mention the blame view that actively fights with browser's built in search functionality.
Having used Forgejo with AGit now, IMO the PR experience on GitHub is not great when trying to contribute to a new project. It's just unnecessarily convoluted.
They have zero fees for individuals too which is amazing. Thanks to it I gained my first sponsor when one of my projects was posted here. Made me wish sponsorships could pay the bills.
Is there more?
That's not a Victorinox you're looking at, it's a cheap poorly made enshittified clone using a decades old playbook (e-e-e).
The focus on "Sponsorship buttons" and feature instead of fixing is just a waste of my time.
Nov 22, 2025 https://blog.codeberg.org/letter-from-codeberg-onwards-and-u...
Quotes from their website:
Infrastructure status [...] We are running on 3 servers, one Gigabyte and 2 Dell servers (R730 and R740).
Here's their current hardware: https://codeberg.org/Codeberg-Infrastructure/meta/src/branch...
[...] Although aged, the performance (and even energy efficiency) is often not much worse than with new hardware that we could afford. In the interest of saving embodied carbon emissions from hardware manufacturing, we believe that used hardware is the more sustainable path.
[...] We are investigating how broken Apple laptops could be repurposed into CI runners. After all, automated CI usage doesn't depend on the same factors that human beings depend on when using a computer (functioning screen, speakers, keyboard, battery, etc.). If you own a broken M1/M2 device or know someone who does, and believe that it is not worth a conventional repair, we would be happy to receive your hardware donation and give it a try!
[...] While it usually holds up nicely, we see sudden drop in performance every few days. It can usually be "fixed" with a simple restart of Forgejo to clear the backlog of queries.
Gives both early-Google as well as hackerspace vibes, which can or can not be a good thing.
Their reliability is not great unfortunately. Currently their 24h uptime is 89% for the main site. They are partially degraded right now.
The 14 day uptime is 98% but I think that’s actually because some of their auxiliary systems have great uptime, the main site is never that great it seems.
I would even consider that moving everything from one single point of failure to an other is not the brightest move.
Github does offer a self hosted product: GitHub Enterprise Server
1. use git or jj
2. pull-request like data lives on the network
3. They have a UI, but anyone can also build one and the ecosystem is shared
I've been considering Gerrit for git-codereview, and tangled will be interesting when private data / repos are a thing. Not trying to have multiple git hosts while I wait
I've been self-hosting it for a few years now and can definitely recommend. It has been very reliable. I even have a runner running. Full tutorial at https://huijzer.xyz/posts/55/installing-forgejo-with-a-separ....
I believe the correct question is "Why they are getting DDoSed this much if they are not something important?"
For anyone who wants to follow: https://social.anoxinon.de/@Codeberg
Even their status page is under attack. Sorry for my French, but WTF?
What does this mean for the Zig project? I haven't heard of Codeberg, they may be great, but for a popular open-source project I'd expect a proper discussion before deciding to move or weighing the pros and cons of different hosting options. From what I'm hearing, Zig is technically excellent but seems to lack level‑headed, mature leadership. That's not unique: many open‑source projects started by brilliant engineers struggle as they grow and need a new leadership structure. That transition can be painful and could even harm adoption.
Then I think the larger point I'd make is that it's impossible to get anyone to care. We've let tech giants like MS become so large they can essentially just ignore problems with their service, and as a customer, it does not matter that you are paying for it, or how much you pay, you're essentially nothing to MS. You pay not only in the direct cost of the product, but in the indirect costs of any problem with the product will hit you; e.g., here, with VMs just spinning due to really basic bugs. But you're right, nobody ever got fired for using Github.
The big "pro" of moving to a smaller platform to me, I hope, is that they're at least incentivized to help you succeed.
One reason I think most CI scripts should just be — as much as possible — scripts, in the literal sense, is that not only promotes running them locally, it also promotes moving to other CI platforms.
That's more of a you problem really.
> I'd expect a proper discussion before deciding to move
And you know the discussion did not happen?
Sorry to be blunt, but you've said nothing of substance. To address the actual criticism you need to explain why these specific "inexcusable bugs" they cite are excusable from your perspective. Otherwise if the whole website doesn't function for months your statement "bugs exist, fixed slower than we'd like" would also apply and be just as meaningless
I guarantee that in ~24 months, most AI features will still remain in some form or another on most apps, but the marketing language of AI-first will have evaporated entirely.
Where have you been the last 15 years? However, I agree with your prediction. Coke making AI advertisements may have had cache a couple years ago, but now would be a doofus move.
On the other hand "personalized ads" is still going strong despite the entire concept being offensive.
At any rate, the feed is still available and you can reach it via browser autocomplete. I open GitHub by typing "not" in my URL bar and landing on the notifications page.
Night and day compared to something like Linear.
$ time curl -L 'https://codeberg.org/'
real 0m3.063s
user 0m0.060s
sys 0m0.044s
$ time curl -L 'https://github.com/'
real 0m1.357s
user 0m0.077s
sys 0m0.096s Github
158 requests
15.56 MB (11.28 MB transferred)
Finish in 8.39s
Dom loaded in 2.46s
Load 6.95s
Codeberg
9 requests
1.94 MB (533.85 KB transferred)
Finish in 3.58s
Dom loaded in 3.21s
Load 3.31sHere are my results for what it's worth
$ time curl -o /dev/null -s -L 'https://codeberg.org'
real 0m0.907s
user 0m0.027s
sys 0m0.009s
$ time curl -o /dev/null -s -L 'https://github.com/'
real 0m0.514s
user 0m0.028s
sys 0m0.016sRight now github is great for discovering and tracking projects, reflecting growth via the star and fork system (although a bit broken in the last few years).
If a federated layer is applied to these github alternatives, you could have an account in Codeberg, and be able to track lots of projects wherever people want to host them. Right now, I see a lot of forgejo servers, but I don't want to register in all of them.
The primary issue with SO was that it was disconnected from the actual communities maintaining the project. A federated solution would be able to have the same network effects while handing ownership to the original community (rather than a separate SO branch of the community)
The people at Zig should use proper CI tools and not something that a big service provider is offering as an afterthought.
One of the nice things about switching to Forgejo Actions is that the runner is lightweight, fast, and reliable - none of which I can say for the GitHub Actions runner. But even then, it's still more bloated than we'd ideally like; we don't need all the complexity of the YAML workflow syntax and Node.js-based actions. It'd also be cool for the CI system to integrate with https://codeberg.org/mlugg/robust-jobserver which the Zig compiler and build system will soon start speaking.
So if anything, we're likely to just roll our own runner in the future and making it talk to the Forgejo Actions endpoints.
I mean, … the outages are a big part of it. But those outages also extending to taking out my own hardware (e.g., through bugs like the above consuming resources on my own compute) is just double the pain.
But as a product, it's just bad? Riddled with bugs? In no particular order:
* Artifact APIs will return garbage results during a run. Note that the APIs are separate from the GHA actions for interacting with artifacts, and the latter uses undocumented APIs, presumably b/c the documented APIs are buggy AF.
* needs.… will just return junk data, if you typo.
* Builds of actions are not cached, making them rather slow. Many GH official actions hack around this by pointing the tag/branch (e.g., @v4) at a pre-built artifact.
* The pricing is high, compared to other offerings.
* The interface is just FUBAR: e.g., stdin is a pipe, which will wreak havoc on some commands that change their behavior when piped to. stdout & stderr are pipes, which although GHA ostensibly supports colored output, this basically renders it useless.
* Jobs, steps, actions are conceptual mud. There's a few ideas, like "execute this thing" in there, but its all jumbled up/duplicated. Container settings are configured per-job, so if you want to run some steps in one container, and some in another, but in the same job, you're just going to be left out to dry.
* Secrets are hard to manage, and even harder to not leak.
* The expression language has all sorts of corners, like coerced types and functions with parse-time side-effects!.
That's just a few of the bugs I've encountered.
And there exist a lot of specialized solutions out there, where the business model is purely CI.
Now that zig is fairly well known and trusted, it makes sense that this is less of a concern for them when migrating away.
Single ~6mb executable, blazing fast. I've been a happy user for years.
It might be great for single person projects, which I guess is fine for hobby stuff, but unless you luck out like Richard Hipp and manage to become a well-paid hermit working in a effectively-one-person cathedral model, then it's not really going to work for most projects.
Personal, small and medium sized projects are 99% of all projects.
I think the bigger problem is that these big megacorporations control so much. I find Google even more problematic than Microsoft these days in that regard. AI worsens this problem, but even without AI it already was a problem.
Migrating the main Zig repository from GitHub to Codeberg - 883 comments
it makes me sad to see that github is now going through the same shit, and people are using other random half-ass alternatives, it’s not easy to keep track of your favourite open-source projects across many source forgeries. we need someone to buy github from Microsoft and remove all the crap they have added to it.
Most public forge instances and web presence for open source projects have RSS feeds.
Compared to then this product is downright mature now. And also, there always were people at GitHub who delivered crappy products outside the core that most people working on FOSS got to see. Enterprise Cloud has a ton of sharp edges and things that make you ask "WHY" out loud. Notifications with SAML enabled are broken in countless ways (I have 0 out of 12 notifications right now), newly onboarded users are encouraged to click a "request copilot" button that sends emails to admins you can't disable, policy toggles that used to do one thing get split up and not defaulted properly. The last two in particular are just dark pattern hacks to get people to use Copilot. In an enterprise product.
I haven't used GHES, but I imagine it's worse.
https://github.com/torvalds/linux/pulls?q=is%3Apr+is%3Aclose...
This one is almost a one-line change (technically they need an extra flag in the YAML but that's hardly difficult): https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/12882#discussi...
That said, I still think Github is fine, and you can't argue with free CI - especially on Windows/Mac. If they ever stop that I'll definitely consider Codeberg. Or if Codeberg gets support for stacked PRs (i.e. dependencies between PRs), then I'm there! So frustrating that Github doesn't support such an obvious workflow.
Not spending on maintenance and spending gobs on something many people don’t want is far worse. It says we have the money, we just don’t give a fuck.
It kind of does.
I used this a lot in several jobs to work in dependent tickets in advance. Just make another branch on top of the previous (a PR to the other PR branch).
People could review the child PR before the parent was merged. And it requires some less than trivial git knowledge to manage effectively, but nothing extraordinary. Any solution for stacked PRs based on git would also require it (or a custom tool).
I think I'm on their side on this one. From git perspective, it works just as I expect. Something else probably belongs to JIRA or project management instead.
done.
Seriously though the big problem to solve will be squatters, when there are three logical places for a module to be hosted. That could create issues if you want to migrate.
I would rather have this happening after a contender to git has surfaced. Something for instance with more project tracking built in so migration were simpler.
This sounds a bit like an oxymoron. More diversity will only help the ecosystem IMHO.
They didn't, poor wording on Register part. The pull request was closed for inactivity by the bot.
We had technical problems that GitHub had no interest in solving, and lots of small frustrations with the platform built up over years.
Jumping from one enshittified profit-driven platform to another profit-driven platform would just mean we'd set ourselves up for another enshittification -> migration cycle later down the line.
No stunt here.
CI/CD is not good on GH either.
At this point the problem is discovery. With a federated search engine the actual forge host would not be an issue anymore.
Tooling support can be miserable when you had something in BitBucket, GitLab, and non-existent if isn't those top 3.
In a big org and in an acquisition, the best engineers coming from that acquisition will find that they will have more impact elsewhere.
This is wrong, that is the current maintainer. Jorge Arellano Cid is the creator of Dillo.
Every single application or webpage having its own AI integration is seriously one of the dumbest ideas in computing history (instead of separating applications and AI tools and let them work together via standardized interfaces).
Same effect at play watching all the top-tier AI corps under heavy competitive fire still, trying hard to keep the audience attached while battling to stay on top of (or keep up with) the competition. This mainly (for now) benefits the user. If OpenAI were to trailblaze on their own, we'd all be paying through the roof for even the most basic GPT by now.
"top-tier" is not a term I would use to describe Microsoft
the self hosted runner host is some horrific dotnet csharp mono monstrosity and "language" is some javascript wrapper nonsense that needlessly creates a half baked dsl around running basic shell commands.
it has a pretty ui, but that's about it.
The Zig attitude towards AI usage is a bit odd in my view. I don't think it's that widely shared. But good for them if they feel strongly about that.
I'm kind of intrigued by Codeberg. I had never heard of it until a few days ago and it seems like that's happening in Berlin where I live. I don't think I would want to use it for commercial projects but it looks fine for open source things. Though I do have questions about the funding model. Running all this on donations seems like it could have some issues long term for more serious projects. Moving OSS communities around can be kind of disruptive. And it probably rules out commercial usage.
This whole Github is evil anti-capitalist stance is IMHO a bit out of place. I'm fine with diversity and having more players in the market though; that's a good thing. But many of the replacements are also for profit companies; which is probably why many people are a bit disillusioned with e.g. Gitlab. Codeberg seems structured to be more resilient against that.
Otherwise, Github remains good value and I'm getting a lot of value out of for profit AI companies providing me with stuff that was clearly trained on the body of work stored inside of it. I'm even paying for that. I think it's cool that this is now possible.
MIT license requires attribution, which AI algorithms don’t provide AFAIK. So either (a) it’s fair use and MS can do that regardless of the license or (b) MS can’t do that. In any case, yeah, that’s not the issue Zig folks have with GitHub.
MS training AIs on Zig isn't their complaint here. They're saying that Github has become a worse service because MS aren't working on the fundamentals any more and just chasing the AI dream, and trying to get AI to write code for it is having bad results.
Edit: Scrolling comments I see something called Codeberg but why am I getting connection refused?
Another edit: Oh because Codeberg is down. I had to look at another thread on the frontpage to find that out...
MS in particular _really_ seems to be sacrificing itself on the altar of Roko's Basilisk; they appear totally incapable of doing _anything_ that isn't AI-branded anymore.
MS need a stint of focusing on what users want rather than ramming stuff down their throat unasked hoping they’ll swallow
Securing base, easy to use and reliable OS should be no.1 priority.
Forcing down the throat services the users largely do not want just breeds resentment, and not only in people treated that way but also anyone that hears about it.
If W11 was "hey, we did some optimising, fixed some bugs and HEY, if you have TPM2.0, we can do that little step to make your machine more secure!" there would be far less resentment.
Similarly with every other feature, ask user, present the benefits, fuck off if they don't want to. NOT "turn it on by default then let them try to figure out how to turn it off". And then ask them again every few days with only option being "remind me later" as current copilot feature for teams does.
Bun is made with Zig, and they just got acquired by Anthropic.
Ghostty is another notable piece of software made with Zig.
I assume the Bun acquisition is fueling most of this Zig news. There's about 4 articles on the frontpage about Zig.
https://ziglang.org/news/migrating-from-github-to-codeberg/
> Putting aside GitHub’s relationship with ICE
That was the extent of it. Six words.
Furthermore, this submission is an independent post, not from Zig, reporting on the original and adding more context.
> To use a great quote "either do or don't, but I got places to be".
What exactly is your complaint? The move had already been completed at the time of the original Zig post. They did do it.
There’s no incongruence between posts. The nature of your discontent or how it could possibly affect you isn’t clear in the slightest.
Like, reading and posting on Hacker News?
We really got to the point where AI is both a problem and solution to the problem it causes.
Github is great. It barely changes at all and yet it's still too much for this originalist crowd.