Zig Software Foundation 2025 Financial Report and Fundraiser

> CI & Website $14,986.73

What a waste of money, seriously

This would not be wildly out of place for a small to medium business running a business card website. On the high end, certainly, but not unheard of.

But if it's also including the cost of all the CI and build steps for the entirety of Zig infra?

That seems pretty reasonable for me. Although maybe my cousin Katie could do it for 1/10th the price in WordPress

Given they bought their own machines to not perpetually pay cloud infrastructure...

For comparison, in the same year Rust Foundation spent $567,000 on this category - more than ZSF's entire expenses for everything. That's 38x more money.

Source: https://rustfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/Annual...

The report says that includes two full-time infrastructure engineers. Which isn’t crazy given Rust infrastructure’s userbase and traffic.

$15k seems pretty lean to me for Zig since it includes hardware purchases.

Meanwhile, Debian spends $0 on CI, buildds, website, package distribution. Its all donated by hardware/CDN/hosting partners.

>That's 38x more money.

Rust gets at least a 1000x more usage than Zig, so their infrastructure costs are not as bad in comparison.

Zig team didn't want to be beholden to the whims of outside sponsors which is an understandable position.

How so?

> Rust gets at least a 1000x more usage than Zig

1. I highly doubt your ballpark estimate.

2. I don't think CIs care that much how many users a language has, they care about the number of computations they need to run for each commit/merge.

Zig CI runs all compiler stages, I guess that's why. Does not seem crazy to me.

It's also the one-time cost of buying some machines, not just renting.

So in practice money is effectively being donated (donating hw is not free) to be spent on CI, not very differently than in our case, but you're delighted to not know the numbers and like to imagine it's $0. Ok :^)

There are projects that spend more than that every day.

I don’t think that ballpark estimate is that far fetched? Usage isn’t a reflection of the merits of the two languages. Rust is simply older. It reached 1.0 10 years ago, and it is further along the adoption curve. Zig is yet to reach 1.0 and has mostly early adopters like bun, TigerBeetle and ghostty. I have no doubt that usage will substantially increase once Zig reaches 1.0.

To give you a sense of Rust’s growth, check out this proxy for usage (https://lib.rs/stats). Usage roughly doubled each year for 10 years. 2^10 = 1,024. It’s possible Zig could manage a similar adoption rate after reaching 1.0, but right now it’s probably where Rust was in 2015.

> CIs don’t scale with the number of users

Each Rust release involves a crater run, where they try to compile every open source Rust repo to check for regressions. This costs money and scales with the number of repos out there. But it is true, this only happens once in 6 weeks.

But I think the factor that makes a bigger difference is that Rusts code bases are larger and CI takes longer to run on each commit.

In every Zig thread, someone needs to mention Rust /s.

> is that Rusts code bases are larger

And Rust compilations are much slower too.

> Some of these costs were one-time costs to purchase machines that sit in our homes and offices

We don't know much of it was burned to cloud. Perhaps in 2026 report in will be $0 (or just electricity costs) because it all runs in-house.

crater runs are constantly running [1]. Every time there is a PR with any danger of causing a regression a crater run can be requested.

[1]: https://crater.rust-lang.org/

My mistake, sorry!

1000x seems low to me.

Rust is used in production by many companies out there.

Hi Andrew - From an PR perspective, I think now that zig have enough attention it may be better to stop doing comparison with or even mentioning Rust.

Rust was hated not because of Zig or any other languages, but their Rust Evangelism Strike Force. Some day these comparison may back fire. Zig can stand on its own now, and already quite widely known. May be best to have peace rather than war.

Just my ( may be useless ) 2 cents.

Also agree with this. I don’t see rust and zig that similar. People building it, governance behind it, use case and just overall vibe.

Don’t find myself choosing between rust/zig after using them both a decent amount

Agreed. The leaders of Zig should stop bringing up competitors unless specifically relevant.

The RESF became unbearable because Rust leaders quietly encouraged language wars online, and especially offline. Zig should avoid that fate.

Rust is not hated. Rust is a widely loved and successful project, growing more popular every year.

There's no war here, only facts that help an ignorant person gain perspective about how much things cost.

They are still dependent on sponsors, just ones that donate cash instead of resources.

That's true but I'm pretty sure that the goal is to have a large number of individual sponsors. A handful of large corporate sponsors can later try to use their sponsorship to exert unwanted influence over the project.