Andrew Kelley quit his job in 2018 to build a programming language. Eight years later, Zig powers Ghostty, TigerBeetle and Uber’s cross-compilation. It’s top 5 most admired on Stack Overflow. There’s just one thing missing: 1.0. Andrew Kelley explains why.
Vitaly talked to Andrew about:
- Why Zig has no 1.0 after a decade, and why that’s deliberate
- Why Zig left GitHub
- Why Zig banned AI from Zig
- What makes Zig better than C (and why every other C replacement failed)
- Andrew’s take on Open Source
It’s a long interview, but I found it very interesting and worth it.
The answer to Bun’s memory bugs was to follow a style guide. Not allocating dynamically stems from the style guide used by a mission-critical financial transactions database. Bun didn’t have to use that style guide, and honestly it would have been overkill. They could have easily adopted a different one, modified one to suit their needs, or made their own.
In general, I agree that Rust does a far better job at preventing these kinds of bugs than a style guide does, but Bun didn’t even try one and decided instead to ask Claude to rewrite it in Rust.