Zig Software Foundation 2025 Financial Report and Fundraiser

> 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.

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.

> is that Rusts code bases are larger

And Rust compilations are much slower too.

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.