On one hand I kinda feel validated for having jumped ship on Zig 3+ Years ago[1] and moving everything to Rust[2], with the language simply being too unstable and unsafe in my eyes, despite my love for comptime and people arguing that Bun and Tigerbeetle were proof that it wasn't the languages fault.

But I also feel bad for the Zig project to loose one of their flagship projects, because while I find the project ultimately anachronistic, I know what it's like to pour your sweat, heart and soul into something, and having it replaced within a week is a sobering experience even from afar.

A couple years ago this would have been unthinkable because of how slow legacy codebases and rewrites are.

I wonder if Tigerbeetle will also have problems arguing for their solution now that the other project they can point to for customer assurance is gone. And I wonder if they will follow suit eventually simply due to marketing pressure (after having been bitten by the Zig compiler I was surprised that they were putting their super duper high reliability database on top of it at all, but with another big player using it there was at least some peace of mind for their enterprise customers).

1: https://github.com/triblespace/tribles-zig

2: https://github.com/triblespace/triblespace-rs

[Since your comment is a duplicate from another thread, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48135476, I’m duplicating my reply to you there]

> I wonder if Tigerbeetle will also have problems arguing for their solution now that the other project they can point to for customer assurance is gone.

In general, we never like to appeal to popularity (a logical fallacy), but why would you assume here that we would point to Bun specifically (or any project for that matter) [1] as an example of Zig’s quality?

We prefer to judge Zig’s quality on its own intrinsic merit:

For example, we subject the language through TigerBeetle to inordinate amounts of fuzzing, perhaps more than any other language (you could say Zig is lucky to have TB’s test suite aimed against it!).

Literally 1,024 dedicated CPU cores, 24/7.

Zig holds up remarkably well.

We also recently pledged $512K to the ZSF, together with Synadia.

These are the kinds of things we prefer to point to. Not hype, but real end-to-end systems engineering, and long term financial support, regardless of the language we choose to use.

[1] I picked Zig back in July 2020. At the time, the largest project was River, but already Zig was a phenomenal choice, and the years have only shown that Zig was probably one of the best design decisions in the development of TigerBeetle. It turned out better than I imagined.

Tigerbeetle is in the database business. They operate on an entire different level of correctness expectations compared to something like Bun. The correctness guarantees they provide come first and foremost from the design, architecture and rigorous testing, not from the language they use for the implementation.

So, hopefully, the tech people involved in choosing a database for their project understand that, and do their own correctness and performance testing before making a decision. As for the business people, the tigerbeetle.com landing page doesn't mention Zig at all, although it probably will come up when they "ask AI" for a comparison. So, yeah, probably some risk. Perhaps the LLM will also point out the Jepsen report on Tigerbeetle to offset it.