Zig Software Foundation 2025 Financial Report and Fundraiser

A masterclass in clear writing and transparency. I wish all nonprofits were like this.

I think you're a little too angry about this.

oh 100%.

I am just annoyed that every time Zig developers publish some articles or even make some comments here on HN they always contain something negative about someone else.

Like even in this thread when someone said that Zig wastes too much money on infrastructure the first thing Andrew Kelly does is to show that Rust spends much more.

The longevity of donation platforms is a major concern for us and GitHub has not been good in that sense.

GitHub Sponsors has not seen a single improvement in the years after its launch (despite us and other organizations chatting with GitHub employees about critical missing features), and GitHub Actions has been tragicomically buggy, clearly showing that software engineering infrastructure is not GitHub's core focus anymore (on top of, you know, the CEO explicitly saying that GitHub is an AI company now).

Related https://github.com/actions/runner/issues/3792

Since we do see ourselves eventually migrating away from GitHub (at least in some form), we would like to steer donations towards a service that we have higher confidence in.

The transparency and clarity is something others should attempt to model in my opinion. If a child can understand it, then what does it hurt to be childish in the report? As a professional I wish more would report in like fashion.

I just read AndyKelley's comment you mentioned, and I can't find anything wrong with it; it's not even saying anything negative about Rust. It just observes that Rust spends more.

Is $100k/year a good salary? Depends. For a software engineer, no, since most software engineers make more. For a paramedic, yes, since most paramedics make less.

To know if $15k is a lot to spend on CI and a website, a great way to answer that question is to look at what peers spend on the same thing. Hard to think of many better peer comparisons for Zig than Rust.

To continue with your metaphor what he did is basically say "My salary is great because I make more than that other guy". That doesn't mean anything.

The comparison to Rust is meaningless.

Each project has different demands and requirements from their infrastructure.

For example, Rust compiles all open-source crates on a regular basis to test for regressions.

You can't just point to Rust and say, "Look at that guy."

If you want to justify the expenses of your infrastructure you need to explain where the money goes.

As your other comment was flagged to death, no I'm not kidding you. I don't use Zig (or indeed Rust) so I don't have any particular feeling about the personalities or relative merits of the languages, other than that they are inferior because I don't like them as much as my favorites.

I think it's a good report because it's very clearly written and I was able to pick up a great deal of information about their financial situation/dynamics from a quick scan of less than a minute. I think if you're asking people for money, having a very high signal-noise ratio like that is optimal. I can read other formats (eg I have been browsing nonprofit form 990s for many years), but I like communication that is short and to the point.

>The comparison to Rust is meaningless.

>If you want to justify the expenses of your infrastructure you need to explain where the money goes.

And they did. Comparing to anything is how a normal human would judge whether the spending is relevant. It is call price comparison. Whether it is a valid comparison is up to the person to decide. And more often that not when the two pricing are so vastly different that person should look a little deeper.