Zig breaking change – Initial Writergate

This is exactly why we chose Zig.

Andrew’s design decisions in the language have always been impeccable. I’ve never seen him put a foot wrong and would have made the same change myself.

This is also not new to us, Andrew spoke about this at Systems Distributed ‘25.

Also, TigerBeetle has and owns its own IO stack in any event, and we’ve always been careful to use stable language features.

But regardless, it’s in our nature to “do the right thing”, even if that means a bit of change. We call this “Edge” and explicitly hire for people who have the same characteristic, the craftspeople who know how to spot great technical quality, regardless of how young (or old!) a project may be.

Finally, I’ve been in Zig since 2018. I wouldn’t exactly call it “shiny new”. Zig already has the highest quality toolchain and std lib of anything I would use.

Good to know, also thanks for the detailed reply! Glad you are fully aware of these nuances, but it also doesn't surprise me considering your amazing presentation of Tigerbeetle! Much success in the future.

> Andrew’s design decisions in the language have always been impeccable. I’ve never seen him put a foot wrong and would have made the same change myself.

Interesting, who designed the old Zig IO stack which alas Andrew needed to replace?

A less experienced Andrew

Indeed, but to be fair, the old stack was done with a hand, not a foot!

I've built a bridge 20 years ago. It was great, people could finally go from one side of the river to the other.

Everyday, more and more people started using that bridge.

In 2025, I've rebuilt the bridge twice as big to accommodate the demand of a growing community.

It's great and the people love it!

> Zig already has the highest quality toolchain and std lib of anything I would use.

My couple of days experience with Zig was very lackluster with the std lib, not that it is bad, but feels like it is lacking a lot of bare essentials. To be expected for a new pre-1.0 language of course.

I think what you're not appreciating is how this design is a huge improvement over the status quo, not only in Zig, but also the streaming interfaces in most languages.

Wait till the SD25 talk on this comes out, to first understand the rationale a bit better!

Thanks zwnow, appreciate your kind words, and my pleasure!

I think you'll enjoy Andrew's talk on this too when it comes out in the next few weeks.

The velocity of Zig has been valuable for us. Being able to put things like io_uring or @prefetch in the std lib or language, and having them merged quickly. Zig has been so solid, even with all the fuzzing we do. It's really held up, and upgrades across versions have not been much work, only a pleasure.

> I think what you're not appreciating is how this design is a huge improvement

The point was that if he did the old design, which needed improving enough to justify breaking the language backwards compatibility, then why say his decisions are impeccable? Pobody's nerfect.

Yes, and my point (in response) was that Zig's status quo was no different from other languages, but now is better. (There's some humor in the issue's title “Writergate” here!)

Again, we use Zig, and this change is welcome for us.

We also like that Zig is able to break backwards compatibility, and are fully signed up for that.

The crucial thing for TigerBeetle is that Zig as language will make the right calls looking to the next few decades, rather than ossify for fear of people who don't use it.

Depends on which language you're coming from. Compared to C or even C++, the Zig stdlib has already many more things to offer. Compared to Python or Node.js it's quite bare bones.

Fair, I was mentally comparing to Go. I was a bit disappointed there wasn't more wrappers around basic OS stuff. Go stdlib wraps everything and does its best to make stuff cross-platform.

In my specific case I was trying to send some DNS messages. I went the route of linking libc and using the posix data structures for DNS messages and struggled quite a bit how to map the C data structures to my program.

This kind of thing is a big barrier to adoption unfortunately.

Actually, nobody.

Here is the commit where Reader/Writer was introduced: https://github.com/ziglang/zig/commit/5e212db29cf9e2c06aba36...

This is a few months after `git init`. You can see I was really just working on the parser, with a toy example to get things started.

Over time, I merged contributions that made minor changes and shuffled things around, and these APIs evolved to kind of work okay. But nobody really considered "the Zig IO stack" as a whole and put in design effort. That is happening for the first time right now.

This is how programming languages are constructed. Things evolve slowly over time, and periodically you have to reevaluate things and do major reworkings.

But some people are upset because you put the new bridge in a new location and now it's inconvenient for them?

Go is literally a Kitchen Sink. I love it, but that stdlib comes with a runtime dependency.

Nah, they are upset because it brought more people, which increased the traffic...

https://www.wired.com/2014/06/wuwt-traffic-induced-demand/

Actually, I wasn’t intentionally designing anything.