> it’s abundantly clear that the talented folks who used to work on the product have moved on to bigger and better things, with the remaining losers eager to inflict some kind of bloated, buggy JavaScript framework on us in the name of progress.
> More importantly, Actions is created by monkeys
This writing really does not reflect well on Zig. If you have technical issues with Github, fine: cite them. But leave ad hominems like "losers" and "monkeys" out of it.
Codes of conduct are perfunctory virtue signalling. Do we really need a unique set of "rules" posted on every project? They all sound like they were written by the same AI bot. That said, it's telling that the Zig leader can't even follow them. The rules should just be taken down.
In my experience it's the opposite of helpful, because it's actually a lot easier to reach consensus on whether someone's being an asshole than on whether they have violated the code in the document.
Code of Conduct cannot stop someone from doing something.
It’s just a document.
However, in this case, the presence of the code of conduct has made it trivially easy to point out the language as wrong in a way whoever wrote this for Zig cannot refute.
The CoC is not there to protect the community, but to protect all the bad actors and give ammunition to attack the good ones.
Happens every time, the maintainers who add CoCs to projects have no problem being an ahole to others.
Update: I know some people love their CoCs, but answer me this, how is this kind of childish name calling allowed and still online, if what I wrote above is not true?
"The bug in this "safe sleep" script is obvious from looking at it: if the process is not scheduled for the one-second interval in which the loop would return (due to $SECONDS having the correct value), then it simply spins forever. That can easily happen on a CI machine under extreme load. When this happens, it's pretty bad: it completely breaks a runner until manual intervention. On Zig's CI runner machines, we observed multiple of these processes which had been running for hundreds of hours, silently taking down two runner services for weeks."
"I don't understand how we got here. Even ignoring the pretty clear bug, what makes this Bash script "safer" than calling into the POSIX standard sleep utility? It doesn't seem to solve any problem; meanwhile, it's less portable and needlessly eats CPU time by busy-waiting."
"The sloppy coding which is evident here, as well as the inaction on core Actions bugs (in line with the decay in quality of almost every part of GitHub's product), is forcing the Zig project to strongly consider moving away from GitHub Actions entirely. With this bug, and many others (severe workflow scheduling issues resulting in dozens of timeouts; logs randomly becoming inaccessible; random job cancellations without details; perpetually "pending" jobs), we can no longer trust that Actions can be used to implement reliable CI infrastructure. I personally would seriously encourage other projects, particularly any using self-hosted runners, to look carefully at the stability of Actions and ask themselves whether it is a solution worth sticking with long-term when compared with alternatives."
----
I agree that the writing in the blog post is more colorful than precise, but sanitizing every bit of expression dulls the internet. Humans invented language for a reason.
> I agree that the writing in the blog post is more colorful than precise, but sanitizing every bit of expression dulls the internet. Humans invented language for a reason.
Where do you draw the line, then? Is a racist screed acceptable to you as long as the following paragraph references technical issues correctly?
The language in the blog post is insulting. Imagine how you would feel if you were the person who wrote this code, and now you are being called a monkey in front of thousands of people on the internet. Certainly you've made mistakes in your code before...or are you saying you've always written flawless code without errors?
These codes of conduct always seemed a bit superfluous to me, but after reading comments like these I can totally see why they are necessary.
Would you perhaps have preferred if they referred to it as "unprofessional" or "sloppy" instead alluding of monkeys?
To me all those mean the same thing, except the latter is more flavorful and makes my eyes less likely to glaze over.
> Imagine how you would feel if you were the person who wrote this code, and now you are being called a monkey in front of thousands of people on the internet.
Er.. so? Why should anyone be allowed into a position of responsibility where their code impacts millions of people if they can't handle the tiniest bit of strong feedback? It was, after all, a pretty egregious bug.
> Certainly you've made mistakes in your code before...or are you saying you've always written flawless code without errors?
I've definitely made mistakes, and also accept that my output might have on occasion been "monkey-esque". I don't see what's insulting about that; we are all human/animal.
> To me all those mean the same thing, except the latter is more flavorful and makes my eyes less likely to glaze over.
And to many others, the difference is that one is informative, the other is likely to turn them off of the author and project forever.
I noticed that you never answered my question. If this is acceptable to you, where do you draw the line? If you can answer that question, maybe you'll be able to see the flaw in your argument.
> the other is likely to turn them off of the author and project forever
Which is absolutely fine. It's their project, their website. If they can't be colorful on their own website, where else can they be! If it turns off some people, I'm sure the author is aware of the risk and happy with that risk.
I, for one, find this kind of colorful language refreshing. Everyone trying to be politically correct makes the internet a dull place.
> Surely you have your own line on what is or is not acceptable discourse. What is it?
I do but I decline to share it here. I'm not going to shift this thread from what the author is doing on their website to my personal beliefs and boundaries!
All I am saying is it is their project, their blog. They can be however much rude they want to be on their website. It's their website, their lines and their boundaries. Where I set my boundaries has no bearing on what Andrew should write on their website.
If Andrew alienates people by his writing, it's his decision, his action, his consequences that he has to deal with. How does it matter where I draw the line?
> All I am saying is it is their project, their blog. They can be however much rude they want to be on their website. It's their website, their lines and their boundaries.
The point is that everyone has different lines for what they consider to be "acceptable" or not. That is exactly the reason why codes of conduct exist - it's an attempt to find a common denomiator so that it can help foster a community where people can feel included without feeling like they are being attacked or insulted.
> Is a racist screed acceptable to you as long as the following paragraph references technical issues correctly?
I'm not the morality police. Nobody should be. I'd still take the article on its technical merits. As a random example, if Satoshi's paper called people using the banking system cattle, I'd still continue reading it.
> Imagine how you would feel if you were the person who wrote this code, and now you are being called a monkey in front of thousands of people on the internet
It would be absolutely fine, nobody is named specifically. He wasn't like Josh Examplemann working on Actions is a piece of shit that botches any feature he touches. Nobody is going to remember a blog post and forever hold anyone that worked on Actions to an unhirable status. And personally, I think it would be good for people to feel some shame for having implemented a feature in such a terrible way. It's not like they were told by their managers to commit these the way that they did. Calling into the sleep binary wouldn't even be more work.
Whoever is behind the new React Start Menu in Windows
along with whoever is responsible for the Chrome Web Environment Integrity
along with whoever is behind the design of OSX Tahoe
along with anyone who is working on Windows Copilot that screenshots your screen
should be ashamed of themselves. The more articles that do that, the better. They are not doing good.
> But leave ad hominems like "losers" and "monkeys" out of it.
Ad hominem happens when someone undermines the argument based on the speaker's background. Here they are not undermining any argument. They're just name calling. This is name calling, not ad hominem.
I get frustrated with tech all the time! I get it. Grr when Actions feels so irritatingly misbehaved…
But how you handle or fail to handle your frustration demonstrates the competence of your character and speaks volumes of what you’d be like to work with.
It's okay to bring some "natural" language in technical communication. It feels more humane. All the whitewashed corporate language, riddled marketing bullshit feels so soul dead.
If this was true, teachers and trainers would have the easiest job in the world: just insulting their pupils would stop them from failing an exam, race or whatever again.
I could try to explain that most jobs are way more nuanced than just 'failing and deserving to be called a monkey' or 'not failing.' Or, I could just call you names for not seeing that, you could call me names back, and we can keep doing this forever.
Your argument is lacking of nuance, declaring that the criticism being levied here must be a simple binary.
The specific error they are criticizing is extremely egregious, akin to builder declaring a house without a roof complete. “failing and deserving to be called a monkey” is a criticism being levied against a 0/100 level mistake, not a mere minor mistake as you are claiming.
While it might be desirable to use less colorful language, it is frankly challenging to express the sheer level of grossly incompetent organizational ineptitude on display here in a reviewed and delivered product actively causing negative customer impact for literal years which is trivially fixed and yet has been ignored.
Customers of Github should be infuriated that Github gleefully foists such utterly defective software upon them. It is hard to get that across in dispassionate writing.
> You can express dissatisfaction and anger „naturally“ without calling people losers and monkeys.
I can't speak for others. But if I am screwing up as badly as GitHub is, I'd rather someone calls me a loser and monkey for it. It's like someone splashing ice cold water on my face and showing me the reality. It's going to be very uncomfortable, yes. But I'll learn from it and try not to screw up so badly again. I find this kind of natural outburst refreshing really.
Sure. If you feel the need to write "this is shitty code", fair enough, I'm fine with making allowances for that kind of language. But please leave it at that, instead of also insulting the people who wrote it. There are, unfortunately, plenty of ways for bad incentives to result in competent people creating bad products.
Well at least he's being a jerk on his own blog here, so it's easy to ignore. I've seen instances of him unreasonably lashing out without the decency of understanding others' writings first on third party properties. A quick search turned up https://discourse.llvm.org/t/rfc-libc-taking-a-dependency-on... can't remember the details of other instances.
I agree that he came out blasting, and the language and tone, particularly at the beginning are pretty off-putting. That being said, having read the full post, I can't say I disagree with the motives and point of view.
God this entire thread is just people defending him as “a breath of fresh air” and “just using human language”. There is something in people that makes them enjoy seeing others belittled like this. A complete lack of empathy, because no one would like to be treated this way themselves, but are perfectly happy seeing others treated this way. One commenter justifies it by saying “if I’m fucking up, it’s ok to speak to me this way”. Sure guy, we believe you.
This reminds me of when Linus Torvalds would lose his shit now and then and launch gratuitous personal attacks at people who had made mistakes. Comment sections would be filled with folks laughing at Linus’ latest victim. “Couldn’t be me, I would never make this mistake”. Even Linus admits he was wrong to treat people this way and he’s taken time off to work on himself and become a better person. But there is still no shortage of people who enjoy seeing pain inflicted on others, nor people larping as a younger Linus.
Evidently not "clearly", given the number of people who didn't see it, but that was my first interpretation as well: I took it as an "infinite monkeys" reference that, in context, was probably standing in for "some un-tested gen AI output". Which, clicking on the link, seems to be what happened?
Anyway, yes, "infinite monkeys on typewriters" seemed to be the relevant meaning of "monkeys" here.
Apparently there's some specific US cultural history of people calling black people "monkeys" as a racist insult, and so some people from there immediately leap to assume that any use of "monkey" as an insult is that.
Agreed. Came here to point out that the lack of professionalism and common courtesy here is reminiscent of the dark entitled days of open source in the late 90s that had attitude of "We build free software so we can tell you to go fuck yourself.". Hope we're not headed back there.
I have a lot of understanding for such personalities too, I'm probably quite like this myself although I try my hardest to not open my mouth like this. For example I got blocked by Jonathan Blow over a simple question on twitter but I don't think too badly of him now, it's just a miscalculation on his part or him trying to optimize his life as a passionate person. But you really need to make sure to be right when you are putting other people down. I mean REALLY right, you need to tripple check that what you are doing is going to help an honest person to improve themselves. So my opinion is: You can be super critical but you have to be right.
I'm not going to touch the political parts. But my main point is that the migration itself is obviously not well done, he isn't even migrating issues nor migrating perks for sponsors, splitting the community and attention apart. You could even say that he's critical of people who keep using github sponsors. In my view the text is implying that you are hurting ziglang if you keep using this thing that is a liability for ziglang... oh the horror of giving someone money in a way he doesn't like. People like this forget that contributors are doing free work for them too, it's not just one way. Everything that creates friction for them is real work you just caused them.
“We build free software so we can tell you to go fuck yourself.”
Sounds like a great thing compared to the sanitized corpo bullshit from nowadays. Microsoft bought themselves into OSS with github and each project has a bland CoC.
It’s pathetic. Even the github monkeys know deep down that this is wrong.
You're right, I've been hearing lots of good things about Zig and I wanted to check it out but I'm glad I saw this post. I want no part of this thing.
I've heard people call other people "monkeys" before in a work setting. it's never good. Fact is, you don't need to call anyone names or insult them.
The takeaway for me is that the Zig project is led by people who are extremely immature and toxic. I simply don't trust any decision these people make. If you can't bring yourself to respectfully disagree with other human beings, if you resort to calling names and insults targetted at developers because of bugs, then i don't trust you to not backdoor your own code, or do something harmful to those who rely on your work because of some drama, spat or activism.
Even if actual political activists did this it would be unacceptable. If you called Netanyahu a monkey because of his Gaza genocide, most people who are pro-palestine will try to cancel you! Not because they think highly of him, but because it hurts the cause more than it helps.
Andrew: It seems you don't respect your own self or your community enough to set an example of decorum and civility. You've made Zig a platform for your own personal shitposting. Please do better!
if they call their employees monkeys, certainly. I think every big tech company is well aware of lawsuits regarding a hostile work environment, work place bullying, etc.. they all have company wide training on these topics.
Having been in that situation before, if I even get a hint that I would be treated this way, I'm backing out of any interview. I won't say for no amount, but for no amount they would consider reasonable compensation would I think it's worth it. People commit suicides over this stuff. This isn't a joke. Life is too short. I mean just seeing other people treated this way is horrible on its own. I can't believe people defend this stuff. People need to learn to be ashamed again.
Linus losing is temper over a contributor messing up is not the same as calling people who maintain a free service (github - unless Zig was paying) monkeys. Correct me by all means, but did Linus call someone a personally denigrating name like that?
Either way, I like linux but I've avoided operating systems like freebsd and openbsd for less, so I agree. I've said plenty enough against Linus when he did lose his temper and started cussing at people.
And to be clear, I consider people who defend him (and in this case Andrew) far worse of an individual than the original offenders. People mess up, they're led astray by being put in positions of leadership and authority. That I get, and that's why i'm calling him out here. If he was random person, I wouldn't have bothered. But the enablers and defenders are the real problem. I hope you're not one of them. If you are, I consider you people responsible for every single work place bullying and toxic environment out there. People do great things without being classless uncivilized bullies.
Clearly, my distrust is based on Andrew's publicly displayed character, not an analysis of historical behavior. When you see a Chef not wash his hands after using a restroom, you should avoid eating at their restaurant, even if you have no proof they don't wash their hands in the kitchen prior to cooking.
The important observation for me is that he didn't know where to draw the line, and this is regarding people he doesn't work with, unknown/random Microsoft employees. Will he cross the line if someone he does know and trust does something he disagrees with? I would like to give him the benefit of the doubt, but the bar is high when it comes to trusted software like programming language compilers.
I wish Zig all the success, but only if it's community and the tech community as a whole can hold it's leadership accountable instead of making excuses and defending him like this. It's ok to tell people you admire and respect they screwed up.
Your logic doesn't really pan out here, as Zig is a fully open source project (so any backdoor would be out there for eyes to see) and so far there have been primarily good things said about it. Similarly Linus Torvalds was pretty "toxic" for years, and it never affected the quality of the Linux project negatively. And Linux essentially runs the world of tech.
Backdoors can be called bugs. They could introduce a backdoor and fix it a CVE in the next release and no one would the wiser.
I don't defend Linus either, but I don't consider him calling someone a monkey or dehumanizing people either. If he has, please send me the lkml archives, I've been on the fence with going full on Apple anyways :)
I really don't understand what any of this has to do with "trust", especially of the project or code. If anything people who want to gain undeserved trust would be incentivized to appear to follow a higher standard of norms publically. The public comments would be nice and polite and gregarious and professional, and the behaviour that didn't meet that standard would be private.
FWIW I've never programmed a line of code in zig and I don't know who this developer is.
All I got from it was "seems like GitHub is starting to deteriorate pretty hard and this guy's fed up and moving his project and leaving some snark behind".
>If you called Netanyahu a monkey because of his Gaza genocide, most people who are pro-palestine will try to cancel you! Not because they think highly of him, but because it hurts the cause more than it helps.
Your reading of the current political climate is very different to mine.
I don't know about that. in my view, you can call him a murderer, genocidal, sociopath, anything related to his actions. But calling him an epithet, comparing him to an animal is a different thing. Even physical violence is more tolerable. of course people can say whatever they want in private, i'm talking about public discourse. terms like "monkey" and "dog" have been used across cultures to mean really nasty things. It's dehumanizing (literally!), it says as much about the speaker as it does about the subject.
I agree that the article is strongly worded, and Andrew seems quite angry/frustrated. However, it also gives me flashbacks of how it was back in the golden days, when Linus was calling wannabe kernel contributors idiots who should have died because they "couldn't find their mothers tit to suck on".
Having low patience is a quirk of our nerd culture, and now that the woke season has ended, it seems to be going back to how it has always been!
While I generally think constructive criticism is usually the right choice, I suspect Github will never get the message unless there are some very strongly worded criticisms. In Andrew's defense, he did post some constructive evidence of things he considered problematic.
A high-profile repository like Zig moving off of Github is as loud a message as one can give. Tossing in "losers" and "monkeys" only muddies the delivery.
The most effective message GitHub can receive is when they don’t get to invoice you.
GHA in particular is a hot mess, I’m as surprised as a decade ago that anybody is using this crap. IMHO it’s bugs as a service kind of product, and the bugs start at the core design with the ‘pretend yaml but actually an unholy mix of shell, js and json’ language.
The unfortunate truth is that this is where we are as a society. It doesn't reflect poorly on them. It reflects well. They're straightshooters. Theyre not afraid to speak candidly (your definition of candid may differ). They inject humor. You may not like it personally, but it doesn't reflects poorly even if it should.
Calling people monkeys and losers doesn't particularly tickle my sense of humor. If anything, it reminds me of Linus Torvalds from his toxic ages. Fortunately, he has matured well. Andrew seems like a smart guy, I hope that he will have the emotional maturity to realize that you can be no-bullshit and straight to the point without the need to call people names.
It sure reads like it was meant satirically to me. Whether one finds it funny or offensive is up to the reader though, and I assume the GP is basically saying an article should be written such that "or offensive" isn't reasonably on the table.
Thankfully, many of us are not in that "We" group you're referring. This is a toxic culture I want no part of. It says a lot about the nature of the Zig community.
It's not only an announcement that they are moving out of GitHub.
It is a call to others to do the same.
They are also protective of the donation funds they receive, which has been wasted by defects in GitHub's CI.
And Microsoft... they acquire or partner with companies, then mismanage or make inferior clones of existing products, and make money out of it. That's their business model. SCP 86-DOS (MS-DOS), Apple Macintosh (Windows), Sybase ASE (SQL Server), IBM OS/2 (NT), Mosaic (Internet Explorer), and then acquisitions like Minecraft, Xamarin (dead), Skype (dead), GitHub, LinkedIn (sea of fake jobs and ghosting).
People don't buy their products by choice, they are trapped into them. You got Windows because your computer came with it and the software you use needs it, or you are forced to use it at work. You use MS Office because you have to use the MS Office format to collaborate with others, maybe at school or at work, or with the government (every government in the world has been lobbied to adopt their products). They tried hard to go further than this and failed, but they keep trying persistently. They failed to own the Internet (Microsoft Network), they failed to own the web (Internet Explorer only websites), they failed to own mobile (Windows Phone), now they are trying once with AI, going as far as taking snapshots of everything you do (MS Recall). Imagine being told your computer, bought with your own money, is no longer yours (MS Pluton, forced Windows updates, forced advertisement)... and even being happy with it or not caring about it at all... or getting to work every morning to make all of that happen... is not that what we would call a monkey loser?
Oh no! Anyways... I love zig and I'm glad they're moving off what GitHub has become, not least because enough high profile projects leaving might make them focus on what matters again.
They've abandoned GitHub for Codeberg because GitHub has ICE as a customer. Codeberg uses Paypal which is a member of the ICE "Virtual Global Taskforce".
There is a purity spiral that organizations can enter when they start doing this, which ends up with you shoving yourself into a cold dark corner of the internet and still not being completely detached from the badness because Cisco provides infrastructure for nearly every major weapons manufacturer and defense department globally.
You're mad because they left a vendor because they switched to a different vendor that you think is just as bad but also you're accusing them of starting an "inevitable purity spiral?" Which one is it?
It seems like every organization in America is compromised in some way if you dig deep enough. Certainly you can find reasons for every big tech. There's still a balance to be struck though.
I agree that's a funny coincidence. But, what about the change it wanted to commit? It is at least slightly interesting. It is doubly interesting that changing line 638 neither breaks nor fixes any test.
So much vague outrage over nothing. That CI system created by so called monkeys is the one of the best free CI service in the world. Not everyone has the millions of dollars like Zig Foundation to create their own CI servers.
After that they appreciate GitHub Sponsors, but say it is now a complete liability just because a project leader left. What are the actual changes? Any new rule? But no, it is now a "liability" and we should accept it.
Honestly speaking I like how big projects are exploring new hosting options. But there is no need to attack other platforms like this to promote your new host.
The only good thing about it is their very generous limits for "open source" projects (it doesn't even have to be free software AFAIK, just the source has to be visible to everyone).
The CI service itself is an absolute trash fire caused by the usual Microsoft NIH, and if they have financial means not to deal with it anymore, I see no reason for them to waste their limited development time on dealing with it.
Where else would the CI service for a Microsoft product be invented? NIH is a weird insult in this context. If Microsoft had instead acquired a CI service you’d be complaining about how they’re reducing competition.
I agree it’s unprofessional, but at least we’re talking about GHA, even if tangentially, because there’s a lot to talk about and not much of it is good.
> As a bonus, we look forward to fewer violations (exhibit A, B, C) of our strict no LLM / no AI policy, which I believe are at least in part due to GitHub aggressively pushing the “file an issue with Copilot” feature in everyone’s face.
Also, the big part of that issue is people are incentivized to make their GitHub profile look good to have a higher chance of getting hired. Any non-mainstream platform is not as compelling to get social credits.
Issues and Pull requests are only optional features . Open source projects could always use GitHub as just git host/mirror like how torvalds/linux is setup .
PRs are not optional: there is no way to disable them on GitHub. I can't be sure that this is intentional, but it certainly works out well for them that this is one of many properties which make it quite difficult to migrate away from the platform.
Yeah, that's actually what we've done on the Zig GitHub repository. However, it doesn't stop pushes to existing PRs, which isn't ideal; and, yes, it's quite hard to escape the conclusion that there being no "until I turn it back on" option is intentional.
PRs aren't an optional feature, though acting on PRs is obviously optional; nothing prevents you from ignoring or (even automatically) closing all PRs from anyone who is not on a list of approved contributors.
Pull requests are not optional on GitHub. Users have been begging for more than a decade for an option to disable pull request for a repository, and GitHub continues to ignore them.
As another poster noted, you can disable it by limiting all interactions (6 months at a time). It is not ideal, but it does work to for PRs. You should also close all current PRs when you do that so users cannot push to those branches as well.
Not long back we were all urged to take CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md seriously. I've arrived at a place where the next thing I open source will include such a file which discusses not sending slop to the repository.
I don’t have strong opinions about Zig or Codeberg, but I find the self-described status of the latter’s infrastructure concerning[1]: they’re seemingly running faulty hardware in production with limited redundancy, and are actively soliciting more hardware of unknown quality/reliability/provenance from their community. This is cool for a hobbyist project, but it doesn’t scream “stable platform for a post-GitHub world,” which is how I’ve seen Codeberg (aspirationally) described.
It seems like they have reliability issues; if I read their status page correctly, they have incidents every few minutes. Or how should one read their all green page?
Reading the infra part of the post made me smile, I spent part of my week putting workloads on spot but this is the real spot market. Chaos monkey is running in prod if you are ready for it or not.
Jokes aside, the technical depth it takes to make that one server run is impressive. That makes me more interested in codeberg, not less, though I’m going to keep my own mirror of the zig repo until they get some better hardware.
To be clear, I’m not knocking it; I also like to reuse old computers. But it’s incongruous with replacing GitHub, rather that being a “weirdo hobbyist” version of GitHub.
And yet the amount of work time I've missed out on from github being down is slightly concerning in retrospect. I imagine the smaller scale of codeberg will actually lead to more uptime despite chaos monkey's best efforts.
The numbers aren’t looking great so far[1]: they’re not cracking 3 9s on their primary service, and their CI/CD isn’t even cracking 2 9s. And these numbers are much better than when I checked a few days ago!
(This should not be read to imply that I think that GitHub’s reliability is acceptable; it clearly isn’t.)
> Putting aside GitHub’s relationship with ICE, it’s abundantly clear that the talented folks who used to work on the product have moved on to bigger and better things, with the remaining losers eager to inflict some kind of bloated, buggy JavaScript framework on us in the name of progress.
This says more about the author than anything else.
You're running what aims to be a major programming language - have it where people expect and live with your gripes about the platform.
In retail you set up your store in the biggest mall with the most customers walking past - sure you can go set up in some back alley but don't expect customers to come to your store. This remains true even if the mall owns forget to mop the floor.
This feels immature and does not give confidence in the project/language leadership.
> You're running what aims to be a major programming language - have it where people expect and live with your gripes about the platform.
The core types who will make use of, contribute to, and/or otherwise use the repo likely don't need it to be on GitHub. Having it "where people expect" is useful for drive-by contributions but Zig doesn't really need that.
Furthermore, why should we as a larger community cede things to GitHub and Microsoft? It doesn't change unless larger parties move the needle.
None of this means that you have to be on a specific platform. GitHub as default/mandatory is a single point of failure for the entire tech industry.
For an example of another language that avoids being entirely coupled into Github, Go has it's real code hosting and CI interaction on a Gerrit instance, with some sync back and forth to GitHub for a few items.
The CI pain and operational blindness mentioned in the Zig post is entirely real.
Eh. Their messaging is immature here, but you don't need to be on the biggest thing - especially when you have a limited set of contributiors, not millions.
It is deeply unfortunate that Git won instead of Mercurial and even more unfortunate that GitHub won. GitHub's code review/PR UI is an abomination. We had better tools 15 years ago and GitHub is still a regression. There are tons of reasons to move off it if you're willing to pay the cost of working with alternatives.
I think it's a broader cultural issue where everyone has to have strong opinions about everything and make a strong stand - instead of picking your battles
Not that I necessarily disagree with their reasoning, but stick to having strong feelings about your core "mission"? It just feels a bit "unstable". Hard to imagine such stuff coming from Java or Python or whatever other major language
Unfortunately, some of us are stuck in a country which is a Microsoft shop, which makes it next to impossible to get into a Linux job - especially an entry-level one (these are basically non-existent where I live). I've even considered moving to a place where Linux jobs are a thing (Europe), but that would mean learning the local language first and also already having sufficient professional Linux experience (no one would hire a foreigner for an entry level role when they could just hire a local).
So unless you've got any bright ideas, I'm stuck in this Microsoft job till someone comes up with some magical Linux roles, or I start my own Linux-based company and twiddle my thumbs because there's no customers...
They could also just be people with bills to pay who are maybe faced with—by some accounts—a very challenging employment market. Or maybe due to disabilities they find the process of finding new work difficult or impossible.
That is fine, but they adopt or delegate corporate opinions onto others. I feel that if you need to lie to people because of money, your job is not honest. (I don't mean you; I mean people who need to do this because otherwise they may lose their job etc...)
Except for the "disabilities" part, which is problematic to classify, wouldn't your description broadly fit the word "losers"?
EDIT: I don't understand the downvotes. It's not a value judgement on Github employees, it's about the meaning of the word "loser". Go back to your teenage years. What's a loser? Someone, often through no fault of their own, keep being in a bad situation, having the "short end of the stick". What characteristically makes them losers is that they lack the audacity to snap out of it.
Isn't that an accurate definition of what "loser" generally means?
Github is migrating from their old infra to Azure. Doing migrations like that is hard, no matter who you are. And from a business and engineering perspective I think it makes sense to leverage the economies of scale of Azure instead of GitHub running their own boxes.
Anyone being forced to use Azure has, at least temporarily until they can find a new job, lost at life, not necessarily through any fault of their own. The poor souls probably also have to use Teams.
The engineers at github are getting paid $300k/year at SWE3 to do their job. I don’t think they lost at life.
Why bring people down so hard? That is really solid money and you can provide for a family, retire in your 40s, and it is work that does not destroy your body.
Spending your life working on making things worse (and knowing it) is pretty demoralizing. I know many people who have made the decision to take a pay cut or just quit when they realize that’s their job.
Sometimes those people aren't realizing that they're making things worse, they're just in a depressive spiral and can't see the other end, or see how much good is still being generated while other things are temporarily worse, or see that different tradeoffs have been made to make things worse in some ways and better in others. Just as people can delude themselves that they're always making a positive impact, people can delude themselves that they're making a negative one. The latter tends to be more costly, though, which can sure be annoying to those with a bias for a more cynical or pessimistic outlook...
Trying to ascribe positive/negative impact to strangers isn't usually a useful exercise, even if you have enough data to make a solid case. It can be cathartic -- imagine a different world where programmers making things worse would screw off and go do something else that's not programing! (I have a similar imagining, like of a world where programming is done by those who love it even outside of work -- even though I've worked with and helped hire excellent engineers who only treated programming as a job, they weren't my favorite to work with, and some were very much not excellent.) The best you can hope for is to trigger some self-reflection, and I do think that's important on an individual level. It's better to not make the world uglier, if you notice yourself doing so then you should probably stop, do something else, or figure out if it's at a level that you can compensate. A Richard Stallman quote I like:
"The straightforward and easy path was to join the proprietary software world, signing nondisclosure agreements and promising not to help my fellow hacker....I could have made money this way, and perhaps had fun programming (if I closed my eyes to how I was treating other people). But I knew that when my career was over, I would look back on years of building walls to divide people, and feel I had made the world ugly."
The absolute state of Github is that I use it dozens of times a day and it works flawlessly, for free, with intermittent outages.
Microsoft is doing more with Github than I can say for most of their products. I won't go to bat for the Xbox or Windows teams, but Github is... fine. Almost offensively usable.
Also, there have been increasing reports of open source maintainers dealing with LLM generated PRs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46039274. GitHub seems perfectly positioned to help manage that issue, but in all likelihood will do nothing about it: '"Either you have to embrace the Al, or you get out of your career," Dohmke wrote, citing one of the developers who GitHub interviewed.'
I used to help maintain a popular open source library and I do not envy what open source maintainers are now up against.
Given the trajectory of Microsoft products it stands to reason Github’s future is uncertain. Also Git is ultimately a hosting platform that any competent software shop can recreate; the people behind the platform matter more than the platform itself.
So you are ok with 2FA, right? If you contribute code there.
Now - what if you are not ok with it? What can you do?
> Almost offensively usable
I think you conflate two points here. One is how useable github is. The other is: control. At which point are you no longer ok with what a private company does? This is not solely about Microsoft alone by the way.
I’m sure this isn’t directed at everyone that works at GH, but it would have been more tactful to fault the people making decisions. Those frustrations are real though.
A blanket ban on LLM-generated code is a completely reasonable position. If someone couldn't be bothered to write the code, why should anyone else bother to read it, let alone merge it?
It's absolutely possible to use an LLM to generate code, carefully review, iterate and test it and produce something that works and is maintainable.
The vast majority of of LLM generated code that gets submitted in PRs on public GitHub projects is not that - see the examples they gave.
Reviewing all of that code on its merits alone in order to dismiss it would take an inordinate amount of time and effort that would be much better spent improving the project. The alternative is a blanket LLM generated code ban, which is a lot less effort to enforce because it doesn't involve needing to read piles and piles of nonsense.
But to determine its merit a maintainer must first donate their time and read through the PR.
LLMs reduce the effort to create a plausible PR down to virtually zero. Requiring a human to write the code is a good indicator that A. the PR has at least some technical merit and B. the human cares enough about the code to bother writing a PR in the first place.
What people don't like about LLM PRs is typically:
a. The person proposing the PR usually lacks adequate context and so it makes communication and feedback, which are essential, difficult if not impossible. They cannot even explain the reasoning behind the changes they are proposing,
b. The volume/scale is often unreasonable for human reviewed to contend with.
c. The PR may not be in response to an issue but just the realization of some "idea" the author or LLM had, making it even harder to contextualize.
d. The cost asymmetry, generally speaking is highly unfavorable to the maintainers.
At the moment, it's just that LLM driven PRs have these qualities so frequently that people use LLM bans as a shorthand since writing out a lengthy policy redescrbiing the basic tenets of participation in software development is tedious and shouldn't be necessary, but here we are, in 2025 when everyone has seemingly decided to abandon those principles in favor of lazyily generating endless reams of pointless code just because they can.
> A blanket ban on LLM-generated code is at least arguably a reasonable policy.
No, I don't think it is. There's more nuance to this debate than either "we're banning all LLM code" or "all of our features are vibe coded".
A blanket ban on unreviewed LLM code is a perfectly reasonable way to mitigate mass-produced slop PRs, but it is not reasonable to ban all code generated by an LLM. Not only is it unenforceable, but it's also counterproductive for people who genuinely get value out of it. As long as the author reviews the code carefully before opening a PR and can be held responsible, there's no problem.
Banning all LLM code doesn't mean they see things in binary terms like that. There is nuance between "all code must have 100% test coverage" and "tests are a waste of time", for instance, but that doesn't mean a project that adopts one of those policies thinks the middle ground doesn't exist.
No wonder they moved to Codeberg. Those kinds of projects tend to do the ol' move to Codeberg for whatever reason. If I had to put an analogy to it, Codeberg is like Kick and Github is like Twitch.
More seriously: I probably wouldn't have called every single current employee of GitHub a "loser", but more because I think truly cool people don't define themselves by where they happen to work at any given time. I'm sure the vast majority of people at GitHub are just tech employees trying to earn a living and don't particularly care whether the Zig guy thinks they're cool or not. What actually matters is that GitHub is a big centralized platform run by Microsoft for their own ends, and it's good to be free of it.
Holy shit, some people in the Zig community are toxic af. By extension, this means the community itself has issues it needs to face.
Not only have some of these folks - including the creator - been shitting in Rust threads, but here they're in here shitting on the awesome engineers at Github for no reason at all.
Good god.
edit: this is written by Andrew, the creator. The culture is rotten from the head.
Their "VP of Community" wrote this in 2020: https://kristoff.it/blog/addio-redis/ I didn't come across it until 2022. Still, particularly that and other writing from him and others convinced me the Zig community is full of goobers. That's not so bad, I have my tastes in immature humor and can sometimes be a goober too, but the application in that post's clearly-marked over-the-top skit still is just bizarre and doesn't encourage me to interact with them. To be more fair to the author and the community though, especially with respect to this GitHub migration, his more serious writing is better: https://kristoff.it/blog/the-open-source-game/ (2021). Some nice things said about Rust and the Rust community, even. In that he outlines a core position of "software you can love" being what he wants to create and inspire people to create, and how tents like "big tech" and "open source" don't really cater to that. The migration off of GitHub is predictable in the sense that GitHub stopped being something a lot of people loved a while ago -- of course some still love it, this tent creates obvious tension. (Though I don't know that Codeberg is any better and worthy of love. A few libraries I use have migrated to it and it seems fine at least, though them using Anubis is annoying and I've gotten the fail page of "Internal Server Error: administrator has misconfigured Anubis." a number of times. It does not spark joy in me.)
someone called some indeterminate anonymous corporate group of people who actively participate in enshittification of a product “losers”. you call that specific private individual “rotten”.
I can't imagine being someone like Andrew, or any BDFL of a popular open source project, and having to deal with folks like this. Imagine posting a timed output of your compiler on a thread about a similar language's slow compiler and having someone cite this as bad behavior.
Anyway, the clear absurdity of this particular post aside, it's not OK to call other people monkeys. I make no statement on the quality of their engineering. But they're people! I'd hope to see a quiet dignity from the Zig folks here. They've done so much excellent work, and I'm sure it's frustrating to see what software can be and then have it sharply laid against what software often is. But kindness is always the way.
Thanks to everyone involved with Zig for their work and love of software!
It's completely fine for someone working on a programming language that is useful for some of the same things as Rust to compare that language to Rust, including in ways that make the language not seem as good. Indeed, this is useful information for someone who is using Rust and is considering using Zig (or vice-versa), or who is new to both languages and trying to figure out which is better for their use case.
Hmm, that seems plausible, yeah. It's unfortunate munchler didn't say something like that. But it seems like now people on HN are dogpiling on this Andrew guy? I imagine he'll feel the same way reading this thread, won't he? Surely there's a solution for bullying other than more bullying?
Regardless, it's hard for me to imagine that many readers will find great intellectual interest in a long thread about what a terrible person Andrew is.
I'm happy to see the move. Codeberg is probably a more stable/long-term solution than SourceHut as the founder is slightly unhinged (but love what he has built). Honestly, either would have been great choices.
More opensource projects should move off GitHub. I moved off it myself.
I’m pretty sure Drew has stepped away from SourceHut. It’s kind of a bummer SourceHut stuck so stubbornly to mailing list only workflows. Everything else about the platform is great.
I believe Drew was taking a "break" from it, but not stepping away in any permanent sense. It's probably better for him to stay involved. I'd like to see him push his idea further. It's great to have options.
Kinda horrible to see that the 4chan bigots use the same strategy to try to discredit drew devault, and implying things of ownership through their own created fake accounts and smearing campaigns. Pretty much all allegations on that page are circumstantial evidence, especially the bot ownership parts that sircmpwn even took down while citing those bigots using it to scrape child porn.
And then the dude of dmpwn posting things on image boards with the tag dmpwn, and forgetting to remove that from screenshots? lol, really?
Having experienced the same kind of doxxing attempts by 4chan bigots, /pol/ and kiwifarms, I think I am qualified to comment on how they operate.
Maybe someone needs to summon the Antichrist a second time to thin out the herd, huh?
PSA: Codeberg currently does not implement accessible account registration. It is impossible for screen reader users to make a Codeberg account due to the image-only captcha. There's a manual fallback path, but no idea how long that takes. I've been forced to use the Wikimedia one, and that was about 3 months. This has been pointed out to them many times, and it's seemingly not something they're willing to fix.
If you didn't know what Codeberg's political stance really is and how they treat the inconvenient part of their userbase... I guess now you know.
> This has been pointed out to them many times, and it's seemingly not something they're willing to fix.
On the exact page you're on is a link to an issue [0] acknowledging that the CAPTCHA is inaccessible and expressing that they plan to drop it (albeit with no concrete time-frame). I don't at all understand your argument that Codeberg must be slow at replying to emails (the "manual fallback path") because Wikimedia are; these are two completely unrelated entities and I don't see why you would make inferences about one from the other.
How is it not? In the not so distant past of the 1930s there were political parties advocating for the mass killing of people with disabilities, or at least the sterilization of those with heritable disabilities. There have been real campaigns in that period that did this type of forced sterilization, especially in some mental hospitals. You'll still find people espousing such beliefs, thankfully at the fringes for now.
Accessibility is the opposite position of that - but it's by no means a universally accepted good, unfortunately, especially when it requires extra effort to implement.
It greatly saddens me to see how little concern there is for accessibility for dev tooling. It says something about our industry that accessibility is often viewed as a “luxury” feature that can be dealt with once you’ve reached some level of success or revenue or whatever.
I’m hopeful AI tools can improve qol for those who require screen readers and similar tools but have a sinking feeling that it will only transfer even more of the burden for accessible access from operator to user.
I'm excited to see this migration happen, mostly because it signals to us (https://tangled.org) that large projects are willing to switch! We're working pretty hard to get Tangled out of alpha—we want it to be the place for free software communities.
Also recently wrote about our vision and commitment to indies and communities (and never enterprise!): https://anirudh.fi/future
Aside: Bluesky PDSes are configured to let you upload up to 100MB per blob. Perhaps it might be worth exploring as a medium for hosting release artifacts? Maybe the web interface can merge multiple blobs as fragments of large release files exceeding 100MB (or 15MB for PDSes using the out-of-box config which seems to be the case for Tangled’s instance)
If voiced and channeled properly, I see very little chance of Microsoft and Github wouldn't prioritize fixes for a critical open source project.
Yes issues have been filed but more could be done back channel.
Personally - I think GitHub is a cultural artifact now. Of the entire planet. Hackers and curious minds from Japan to Alaska and everything in-between flock to GitHub.
Some of the best news I have read all week. We do not need to bend the knee to US megacorporations & proprietary code forges for open source. I hope this causes bigger discussions—especially including locking chat to platforms like Discord along the same lines.
You own the code, you decide where you want to host it. If anyone knows, I'm looking for copyrighted code to deploy my own cloned service to make some money, DM.
It is good to have alternatives to mega-corporations controlling the ecosystem.
Microsoft controlling GitHub is an issue, but one can see this issue emerging in different places too; see shopify puting pressure on the ruby ecosystem, ending with various developers who contributed to ruby (in particular via gems and bundler) no longer being accepted there (via RubyCentral's take-over, under shopify's directive and influence onto ruby). Many more examples can be given here. The thing is that money buys influence, ultimately dictating who can contribute and how. Python forcing mandatory 2FA onto all developers is also an example here - the hobbyist who just contributes code, has not really any benefit here, whereas corporations delegate more "security" onto unpaid folks.
Exhibit A is a github user joelreymont who seems to be making a habit of this behavior. He did a very similar spam on ocaml github.com/ocaml/ocaml/pull/14369
Reminds me of Blindsight by Peter Watts. Aliens viewed our radio signals as a type of malware aimed to consume the resources of a recipient for zero payoff and reduced fitness. This is the same.
I wish GH had issues only every 2 years. That’d be amazing! We see issues weekly - if not near daily - at work. Personally I advocate for self-hosted GitLab. I like their pipelines a lot more than GH Actions too.
What are "P80s"? Given the context, I doubt this refers either to screens used in mineral processing or to home-built firearms, which are all that I see in the first couple pages of search results.
I like Zig for the most part but this post does seem needlessly mean spirited. I don't like Microsoft or GitHub either, but I don't see the point of taking pot shots at the devs who work there.
For a while now I've been dual hosting my projects on both Github and Codeberg and adding a note in the README's [1] explaining the situation. I donate to Codeberg and run my own self-hosted forgejo runners for actions, and maintain much of my testing on both platforms.
I push to Github and then an Action mirrors the code to Codeberg automatically.
I'd fully switch over except practically everybody is on Github and nobody is on Codeberg, and I've had more outages with Codeberg than Github over the past year.
It really feels like there could be some good tooling in this area to make working through multiple Forge's easier and not force things to be centralized so much. Hopefully more projects moving out of Github makes it easier and gets more people contributing elsewhere.
What do you find lacking in tooling in that regard?
I don't think there is all that much friction in distributing git, it's one of the easiest tools to have multiple remotes on. The auxiliary tooling is all open source too, so not much in the way of hosting your own, or for hosted platforms offering the services.
The social aspect of the hosted platforms is unlikely to ever be distributed because that is basically githubs only differentiation.
This was the very first thing I noticed when we (the Zig team) started seriously trialing Codeberg. Honestly, the transition was worth it just for the ability to navigate the website without a 3-5 second wait every time I click a link.
GitHub seems to be the worst of both worlds - partially rendered on the server, but then the frontend inexplicably pulls in additional data like... commit messages??
It's a double hit of latency, and for bonus points, the commit messages won't load at all if your browser is slightly out of date
I don't particularly like Zig, actually I don't like the language.
But I have to admit, it's a bold move, free software projects should be encouraged to do the same.
I haven't really taken a step back to critically think about using GitHub as a platform until now, but I do agree with the points in this article.
While I like the idea of a more distributed repository environment, I will miss the project discoverability, social aspects, and centralization that GitHub offers. It'll probably be awhile before I make a switch, but I will eventually.
To see this just as a hosting switch misses the bigger picture. This is the logical infrastructure conclusion of Zig's 'Zero Dependency' philosophy.
Zig spent years removing dependencies on the system C compiler (zig cc), removing dependencies on libc, and is currently working to remove the dependency on LLVM (the self-hosted backend).
GitHub was just another dependency.
For a project obsessed with reproducibility and toolchain sovereignty, relying on a single proprietary platform (and its changing ToS/AI policies) was a massive architectural liability. They aren't just moving repos; they are eliminating 'Platform Risk' the same way they eliminated 'Linker Risk'.
Apart from his skills and Zig work, this guy sounds like an angry teen or Linus wannabe .His tone makes Zig look like a one egoistic man show even it is not.
What's the main diff between the different repos? I would think whoever keeps the repo free of malicious code is the best. A big player like GH should have an advantage on that. Also not intentional malicious code uploads, but vulnerable code should be detected and reported to tyhe submitters.
Its sad to see people silently supporting Github monopoly.
Any migration out of github should be encouraged.
Decentalized, open-source systems should always be preferred
over corporate walled gardens. Trusting Microsoft never ends well.
The amount of infrastructure/projects/etc that stop with github malfunctions and have
no fallback or operating mirror git is astounding.
Github is eventually going to be enshittified and abandoned, so its fairly wise to
spread projects into multiple(not just codeberg) synced mirrors
where any server failing doesn't stop progress.
No idea if this is a big thing or not, but people don't like AI. Other than leaders who have been sold a promise, and the people charging for that promise.
I for one am thankful for GitHub Actions, having free access to stateless automation and deployment scripts that's versioned along with code, running on Servers I don't have to manage has been a gift.
I don't miss anything from the dark days of managing self-hosted CI servers.
I don't see this site as being the spiritual successor to /. at all, the audience is much more money focused and much less software focused. I miss /. as a low 5 digit user there.
I certainly think that this site has significant overlap with /., though of course not 100% the same. It feels crazy similar to me in fact, like stepping back in time to when I used to post there.
I am not sure it is like sourceforge. The UI of sourceforge was always bad. Github's UI is quite solid. I actually started to hate gitlab recently because of their UI. I always feel in utter confusion when it comes to gitlab.
This is extremely misleading. "Membership" is about direct contribution to and influence over the non-profit; it'd be somewhat analagous to being a GitHub shareholder. The very first question on Codeberg's FAQ [0] makes this abundantly clear, as does the "Join" page [1]. I don't see any part of the website you could go to to get any other impression.
> Thank you to the Forgejo contributors who helped us with our issues switching to the platform, as well as the Codeberg folks who worked with us on the migration
I'd love to see a writeup about these problems/solutions at some point.
Well, integrations are also important. Currently everything works first with Github (Codex, Claude Code, Linear, etc. etc.) so it's just easier. There's also Gitlab for people who don't like Github. Personally for what I do, Github does its job well, and the free private repos are great.
> Effective immediately, I have made ziglang/zig on GitHub read-only, and the canonical origin/master branch of the main Zig project repository is https://codeberg.org/ziglang/zig.git.
If there is one benefit in moving from GitHub it is certainly avoiding receiving AI slop issues on GitHub.
Github was on the decline anyway in the past 5 years, it's time for an alternative and we'll see. Would rather it being Codeberg over something like Sourcehut.
you say this like it's some own or something, but I'd be more surprised if they didn't. believe it or not, they are already donating some of their funds to the upstream ecosystem[0].
> it’s abundantly clear that the talented folks who used to work on the product have moved on to bigger and better things, with the remaining losers eager to inflict some kind of bloated, buggy JavaScript framework on us in the name of progress.
> More importantly, Actions is created by monkeys
This writing really does not reflect well on Zig. If you have technical issues with Github, fine: cite them. But leave ad hominems like "losers" and "monkeys" out of it.
Amusingly, this post violates Zig's own code of conduct: https://ziglang.org/code-of-conduct
> Examples of behavior that contribute to creating a positive environment include:
> - Using welcoming and inclusive language.
> - Being respectful of differing viewpoints and experiences.
> - Showing empathy towards others.
> - Showing appreciation for others’ work.
Codes of conduct are perfunctory virtue signalling. Do we really need a unique set of "rules" posted on every project? They all sound like they were written by the same AI bot. That said, it's telling that the Zig leader can't even follow them. The rules should just be taken down.
It's helpful when people are being assholes to point to a document describing how they're being an asshole and to cut it out
In my experience it's the opposite of helpful, because it's actually a lot easier to reach consensus on whether someone's being an asshole than on whether they have violated the code in the document.
Is it really? In this example, could you not see anything wrong with calling employees losers and monkeys, until someone linked you the CoC?
Code of Conduct cannot stop someone from doing something.
It’s just a document.
However, in this case, the presence of the code of conduct has made it trivially easy to point out the language as wrong in a way whoever wrote this for Zig cannot refute.
It’s working exactly as it should.
To add to it, the post is still calling people losers and monkeys, so the CoC is clearly not working properly.
CoC are the HR department of open source.
> HR is to protect the company, not the employee
The CoC is not there to protect the community, but to protect all the bad actors and give ammunition to attack the good ones.
Happens every time, the maintainers who add CoCs to projects have no problem being an ahole to others.
Update: I know some people love their CoCs, but answer me this, how is this kind of childish name calling allowed and still online, if what I wrote above is not true?
> created by monkeys
I don't particularly care for either Zig or Github, but...
they do precisely cite the technical issues. That snippet links to a Github discussion comment https://github.com/actions/runner/issues/3792#issuecomment-3...
(reproduced below)
"The bug in this "safe sleep" script is obvious from looking at it: if the process is not scheduled for the one-second interval in which the loop would return (due to $SECONDS having the correct value), then it simply spins forever. That can easily happen on a CI machine under extreme load. When this happens, it's pretty bad: it completely breaks a runner until manual intervention. On Zig's CI runner machines, we observed multiple of these processes which had been running for hundreds of hours, silently taking down two runner services for weeks."
"I don't understand how we got here. Even ignoring the pretty clear bug, what makes this Bash script "safer" than calling into the POSIX standard sleep utility? It doesn't seem to solve any problem; meanwhile, it's less portable and needlessly eats CPU time by busy-waiting."
"The sloppy coding which is evident here, as well as the inaction on core Actions bugs (in line with the decay in quality of almost every part of GitHub's product), is forcing the Zig project to strongly consider moving away from GitHub Actions entirely. With this bug, and many others (severe workflow scheduling issues resulting in dozens of timeouts; logs randomly becoming inaccessible; random job cancellations without details; perpetually "pending" jobs), we can no longer trust that Actions can be used to implement reliable CI infrastructure. I personally would seriously encourage other projects, particularly any using self-hosted runners, to look carefully at the stability of Actions and ask themselves whether it is a solution worth sticking with long-term when compared with alternatives."
----
I agree that the writing in the blog post is more colorful than precise, but sanitizing every bit of expression dulls the internet. Humans invented language for a reason.
Then blast the product, not the people who built it.
There's no stupid product, only stupid people.
I must be missing something huge here, or maybe it's the wine -- how is the code in PR 3157 (referenced in a later comment) a proper fix?
https://github.com/actions/runner/pull/3157/files
Is : doing something unusual in GH actions?
The original loop is:
while (time() != timeout) {;}
The fixed loop is:
while (time() < timeout) {;}
I see. I did not realize SECONDS was a built in bash variable.
It is still not a proper fix. It is still busy-looping 100% CPU.
Given that Github Actions is quite popular, probably wasting large amount of energy.
But probably good at generating billable Actions minutes.
One can only hope that not many people use sleeps to handle their CI race conditions, as that itself is also not a proper fix.
> I agree that the writing in the blog post is more colorful than precise, but sanitizing every bit of expression dulls the internet. Humans invented language for a reason.
Where do you draw the line, then? Is a racist screed acceptable to you as long as the following paragraph references technical issues correctly?
The language in the blog post is insulting. Imagine how you would feel if you were the person who wrote this code, and now you are being called a monkey in front of thousands of people on the internet. Certainly you've made mistakes in your code before...or are you saying you've always written flawless code without errors?
These codes of conduct always seemed a bit superfluous to me, but after reading comments like these I can totally see why they are necessary.
Would you perhaps have preferred if they referred to it as "unprofessional" or "sloppy" instead alluding of monkeys?
To me all those mean the same thing, except the latter is more flavorful and makes my eyes less likely to glaze over.
> Imagine how you would feel if you were the person who wrote this code, and now you are being called a monkey in front of thousands of people on the internet.
Er.. so? Why should anyone be allowed into a position of responsibility where their code impacts millions of people if they can't handle the tiniest bit of strong feedback? It was, after all, a pretty egregious bug.
> Certainly you've made mistakes in your code before...or are you saying you've always written flawless code without errors?
I've definitely made mistakes, and also accept that my output might have on occasion been "monkey-esque". I don't see what's insulting about that; we are all human/animal.
Not everyone is build robust enough for being called a monkey or loser straight into the person's face.
> To me all those mean the same thing, except the latter is more flavorful and makes my eyes less likely to glaze over.
And to many others, the difference is that one is informative, the other is likely to turn them off of the author and project forever.
I noticed that you never answered my question. If this is acceptable to you, where do you draw the line? If you can answer that question, maybe you'll be able to see the flaw in your argument.
> the other is likely to turn them off of the author and project forever
Which is absolutely fine. It's their project, their website. If they can't be colorful on their own website, where else can they be! If it turns off some people, I'm sure the author is aware of the risk and happy with that risk.
I, for one, find this kind of colorful language refreshing. Everyone trying to be politically correct makes the internet a dull place.
not being an asshole != political correctness
Surely you have your own line on what is or is not acceptable discourse. What is it?
> Surely you have your own line on what is or is not acceptable discourse. What is it?
I do but I decline to share it here. I'm not going to shift this thread from what the author is doing on their website to my personal beliefs and boundaries!
All I am saying is it is their project, their blog. They can be however much rude they want to be on their website. It's their website, their lines and their boundaries. Where I set my boundaries has no bearing on what Andrew should write on their website.
If Andrew alienates people by his writing, it's his decision, his action, his consequences that he has to deal with. How does it matter where I draw the line?
> All I am saying is it is their project, their blog. They can be however much rude they want to be on their website. It's their website, their lines and their boundaries.
That's funny, because if that is true he violated his own code of conduct: https://ziglang.org/code-of-conduct/#safe-constructive-only
> I do but I decline to share it here
The point is that everyone has different lines for what they consider to be "acceptable" or not. That is exactly the reason why codes of conduct exist - it's an attempt to find a common denomiator so that it can help foster a community where people can feel included without feeling like they are being attacked or insulted.
> Is a racist screed acceptable to you as long as the following paragraph references technical issues correctly?
I'm not the morality police. Nobody should be. I'd still take the article on its technical merits. As a random example, if Satoshi's paper called people using the banking system cattle, I'd still continue reading it.
> Imagine how you would feel if you were the person who wrote this code, and now you are being called a monkey in front of thousands of people on the internet
It would be absolutely fine, nobody is named specifically. He wasn't like Josh Examplemann working on Actions is a piece of shit that botches any feature he touches. Nobody is going to remember a blog post and forever hold anyone that worked on Actions to an unhirable status. And personally, I think it would be good for people to feel some shame for having implemented a feature in such a terrible way. It's not like they were told by their managers to commit these the way that they did. Calling into the sleep binary wouldn't even be more work.
Whoever is behind the new React Start Menu in Windows
along with whoever is responsible for the Chrome Web Environment Integrity
along with whoever is behind the design of OSX Tahoe
along with anyone who is working on Windows Copilot that screenshots your screen
should be ashamed of themselves. The more articles that do that, the better. They are not doing good.
> But leave ad hominems like "losers" and "monkeys" out of it.
Ad hominem happens when someone undermines the argument based on the speaker's background. Here they are not undermining any argument. They're just name calling. This is name calling, not ad hominem.
Yeah this is pretty embarrassing.
I get frustrated with tech all the time! I get it. Grr when Actions feels so irritatingly misbehaved…
But how you handle or fail to handle your frustration demonstrates the competence of your character and speaks volumes of what you’d be like to work with.
It's okay to bring some "natural" language in technical communication. It feels more humane. All the whitewashed corporate language, riddled marketing bullshit feels so soul dead.
You can express dissatisfaction and anger „naturally“ without calling people losers and monkeys.
I think it's a breath of fresh air. Don't want to be called out like this then stop fucking up.
Not everyone is that robust. People get hurt over things like that. Not everyone is a wizard who does not give a fuck and does not need to care.
These are people for God's sake. Empathy!
I'm sure getting called a monkey will stop them from ever making a mistake again.
If this was true, teachers and trainers would have the easiest job in the world: just insulting their pupils would stop them from failing an exam, race or whatever again.
I could try to explain that most jobs are way more nuanced than just 'failing and deserving to be called a monkey' or 'not failing.' Or, I could just call you names for not seeing that, you could call me names back, and we can keep doing this forever.
Your argument is lacking of nuance, declaring that the criticism being levied here must be a simple binary.
The specific error they are criticizing is extremely egregious, akin to builder declaring a house without a roof complete. “failing and deserving to be called a monkey” is a criticism being levied against a 0/100 level mistake, not a mere minor mistake as you are claiming.
While it might be desirable to use less colorful language, it is frankly challenging to express the sheer level of grossly incompetent organizational ineptitude on display here in a reviewed and delivered product actively causing negative customer impact for literal years which is trivially fixed and yet has been ignored.
Customers of Github should be infuriated that Github gleefully foists such utterly defective software upon them. It is hard to get that across in dispassionate writing.
I don't agree with you, but I wanted to say I love your website's design aesthetics. It's fantastic.
> You can express dissatisfaction and anger „naturally“ without calling people losers and monkeys.
I can't speak for others. But if I am screwing up as badly as GitHub is, I'd rather someone calls me a loser and monkey for it. It's like someone splashing ice cold water on my face and showing me the reality. It's going to be very uncomfortable, yes. But I'll learn from it and try not to screw up so badly again. I find this kind of natural outburst refreshing really.
But not when it's against coc
Sure. If you feel the need to write "this is shitty code", fair enough, I'm fine with making allowances for that kind of language. But please leave it at that, instead of also insulting the people who wrote it. There are, unfortunately, plenty of ways for bad incentives to result in competent people creating bad products.
Well at least he's being a jerk on his own blog here, so it's easy to ignore. I've seen instances of him unreasonably lashing out without the decency of understanding others' writings first on third party properties. A quick search turned up https://discourse.llvm.org/t/rfc-libc-taking-a-dependency-on... can't remember the details of other instances.
I agree that he came out blasting, and the language and tone, particularly at the beginning are pretty off-putting. That being said, having read the full post, I can't say I disagree with the motives and point of view.
I have not finished the post because of the tone at the beginning.
IT at higher ranks is about people. This post disqualifies Zig as an org.
> Stuff that used to be snappy is now sluggish and often entirely broken.
and as of when was GitHub known for its snappiness?
> bloated, buggy JavaScript framework
Isn't this the status quo? At least hard requirement for JS, that is. Google's homepage started requiring this recently.
Linux kernel's git, openwrt, esp32.com, and many many others now require it too, via dreaded "Making sure you're not a bot" thing:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44962529
If anything, github is (thankfully) behind the curve here - at least some basics do work without JS.
Well said. It's not good to see such arguments like these.
Came here to say that. Killed my curiosity towards Zig in an instant. What a disrespect.
A pity. Saw Zig as something rising but with this kind of toxicity, no thanks.
And insulting publicly developers like that isn't ok.
God this entire thread is just people defending him as “a breath of fresh air” and “just using human language”. There is something in people that makes them enjoy seeing others belittled like this. A complete lack of empathy, because no one would like to be treated this way themselves, but are perfectly happy seeing others treated this way. One commenter justifies it by saying “if I’m fucking up, it’s ok to speak to me this way”. Sure guy, we believe you.
This reminds me of when Linus Torvalds would lose his shit now and then and launch gratuitous personal attacks at people who had made mistakes. Comment sections would be filled with folks laughing at Linus’ latest victim. “Couldn’t be me, I would never make this mistake”. Even Linus admits he was wrong to treat people this way and he’s taken time off to work on himself and become a better person. But there is still no shortage of people who enjoy seeing pain inflicted on others, nor people larping as a younger Linus.
The "monkeys" here are clearly refering to those kinds with typewriters.
Evidently not "clearly", given the number of people who didn't see it, but that was my first interpretation as well: I took it as an "infinite monkeys" reference that, in context, was probably standing in for "some un-tested gen AI output". Which, clicking on the link, seems to be what happened?
Anyway, yes, "infinite monkeys on typewriters" seemed to be the relevant meaning of "monkeys" here.
vs…?
Apparently there's some specific US cultural history of people calling black people "monkeys" as a racist insult, and so some people from there immediately leap to assume that any use of "monkey" as an insult is that.
Ridiculous to claim this is a "US-specific thing" https://www.academia.edu/22669911/Comparing_black_people_to_...
Agreed. Came here to point out that the lack of professionalism and common courtesy here is reminiscent of the dark entitled days of open source in the late 90s that had attitude of "We build free software so we can tell you to go fuck yourself.". Hope we're not headed back there.
I’ll take that vs no open source software contributors.
Elitism is far from the worst character trait unpaid code janitors can be expected to have.
I have a lot of understanding for such personalities too, I'm probably quite like this myself although I try my hardest to not open my mouth like this. For example I got blocked by Jonathan Blow over a simple question on twitter but I don't think too badly of him now, it's just a miscalculation on his part or him trying to optimize his life as a passionate person. But you really need to make sure to be right when you are putting other people down. I mean REALLY right, you need to tripple check that what you are doing is going to help an honest person to improve themselves. So my opinion is: You can be super critical but you have to be right.
I'm not going to touch the political parts. But my main point is that the migration itself is obviously not well done, he isn't even migrating issues nor migrating perks for sponsors, splitting the community and attention apart. You could even say that he's critical of people who keep using github sponsors. In my view the text is implying that you are hurting ziglang if you keep using this thing that is a liability for ziglang... oh the horror of giving someone money in a way he doesn't like. People like this forget that contributors are doing free work for them too, it's not just one way. Everything that creates friction for them is real work you just caused them.
> I got blocked by Jonathan Blow
You're probably better off for it to be honest.
“We build free software so we can tell you to go fuck yourself.”
Sounds like a great thing compared to the sanitized corpo bullshit from nowadays. Microsoft bought themselves into OSS with github and each project has a bland CoC.
It’s pathetic. Even the github monkeys know deep down that this is wrong.
You're right, I've been hearing lots of good things about Zig and I wanted to check it out but I'm glad I saw this post. I want no part of this thing.
I've heard people call other people "monkeys" before in a work setting. it's never good. Fact is, you don't need to call anyone names or insult them.
The takeaway for me is that the Zig project is led by people who are extremely immature and toxic. I simply don't trust any decision these people make. If you can't bring yourself to respectfully disagree with other human beings, if you resort to calling names and insults targetted at developers because of bugs, then i don't trust you to not backdoor your own code, or do something harmful to those who rely on your work because of some drama, spat or activism.
Even if actual political activists did this it would be unacceptable. If you called Netanyahu a monkey because of his Gaza genocide, most people who are pro-palestine will try to cancel you! Not because they think highly of him, but because it hurts the cause more than it helps.
Andrew: It seems you don't respect your own self or your community enough to set an example of decorum and civility. You've made Zig a platform for your own personal shitposting. Please do better!
> The takeaway for me is that the Zig project is led by people who are extremely immature and toxic.
immature and toxic : welcome to every big tech , you don't want part of them either, right ?
if they call their employees monkeys, certainly. I think every big tech company is well aware of lawsuits regarding a hostile work environment, work place bullying, etc.. they all have company wide training on these topics.
Having been in that situation before, if I even get a hint that I would be treated this way, I'm backing out of any interview. I won't say for no amount, but for no amount they would consider reasonable compensation would I think it's worth it. People commit suicides over this stuff. This isn't a joke. Life is too short. I mean just seeing other people treated this way is horrible on its own. I can't believe people defend this stuff. People need to learn to be ashamed again.
Based on this rationale nobody should use Linux either =))
Linus losing is temper over a contributor messing up is not the same as calling people who maintain a free service (github - unless Zig was paying) monkeys. Correct me by all means, but did Linus call someone a personally denigrating name like that?
Either way, I like linux but I've avoided operating systems like freebsd and openbsd for less, so I agree. I've said plenty enough against Linus when he did lose his temper and started cussing at people.
And to be clear, I consider people who defend him (and in this case Andrew) far worse of an individual than the original offenders. People mess up, they're led astray by being put in positions of leadership and authority. That I get, and that's why i'm calling him out here. If he was random person, I wouldn't have bothered. But the enablers and defenders are the real problem. I hope you're not one of them. If you are, I consider you people responsible for every single work place bullying and toxic environment out there. People do great things without being classless uncivilized bullies.
> I simply don't trust any decision these people make
Do you have an example or two of poor decisions that push you away so strongly?
Clearly, my distrust is based on Andrew's publicly displayed character, not an analysis of historical behavior. When you see a Chef not wash his hands after using a restroom, you should avoid eating at their restaurant, even if you have no proof they don't wash their hands in the kitchen prior to cooking.
The important observation for me is that he didn't know where to draw the line, and this is regarding people he doesn't work with, unknown/random Microsoft employees. Will he cross the line if someone he does know and trust does something he disagrees with? I would like to give him the benefit of the doubt, but the bar is high when it comes to trusted software like programming language compilers.
I wish Zig all the success, but only if it's community and the tech community as a whole can hold it's leadership accountable instead of making excuses and defending him like this. It's ok to tell people you admire and respect they screwed up.
Your logic doesn't really pan out here, as Zig is a fully open source project (so any backdoor would be out there for eyes to see) and so far there have been primarily good things said about it. Similarly Linus Torvalds was pretty "toxic" for years, and it never affected the quality of the Linux project negatively. And Linux essentially runs the world of tech.
Backdoors can be called bugs. They could introduce a backdoor and fix it a CVE in the next release and no one would the wiser.
I don't defend Linus either, but I don't consider him calling someone a monkey or dehumanizing people either. If he has, please send me the lkml archives, I've been on the fence with going full on Apple anyways :)
I really don't understand what any of this has to do with "trust", especially of the project or code. If anything people who want to gain undeserved trust would be incentivized to appear to follow a higher standard of norms publically. The public comments would be nice and polite and gregarious and professional, and the behaviour that didn't meet that standard would be private.
FWIW I've never programmed a line of code in zig and I don't know who this developer is.
All I got from it was "seems like GitHub is starting to deteriorate pretty hard and this guy's fed up and moving his project and leaving some snark behind".
Yes, calling people monkeys is a bad decision.
>If you called Netanyahu a monkey because of his Gaza genocide, most people who are pro-palestine will try to cancel you! Not because they think highly of him, but because it hurts the cause more than it helps.
Your reading of the current political climate is very different to mine.
I don't know about that. in my view, you can call him a murderer, genocidal, sociopath, anything related to his actions. But calling him an epithet, comparing him to an animal is a different thing. Even physical violence is more tolerable. of course people can say whatever they want in private, i'm talking about public discourse. terms like "monkey" and "dog" have been used across cultures to mean really nasty things. It's dehumanizing (literally!), it says as much about the speaker as it does about the subject.
microsoft employee detected. lol to all ms employees, keep downvoting...
I wish :)
Nah, fuck 'em. Call out corpo bullshit where you see it. Github is just LinkedIn for people with compsci degrees now.
And what's wrong with that? Even if you're right, just don't use it, why insult and denigrate people?
Because they deserve to know they're making the world a worse place.
GitHub is definitely not making the world a worse place. Touch grass.
I agree that the article is strongly worded, and Andrew seems quite angry/frustrated. However, it also gives me flashbacks of how it was back in the golden days, when Linus was calling wannabe kernel contributors idiots who should have died because they "couldn't find their mothers tit to suck on".
Having low patience is a quirk of our nerd culture, and now that the woke season has ended, it seems to be going back to how it has always been!
While I generally think constructive criticism is usually the right choice, I suspect Github will never get the message unless there are some very strongly worded criticisms. In Andrew's defense, he did post some constructive evidence of things he considered problematic.
A high-profile repository like Zig moving off of Github is as loud a message as one can give. Tossing in "losers" and "monkeys" only muddies the delivery.
Exactly. I have not finished reading the post. And I never will. It destroys the message and the reputation
The most effective message GitHub can receive is when they don’t get to invoice you.
GHA in particular is a hot mess, I’m as surprised as a decade ago that anybody is using this crap. IMHO it’s bugs as a service kind of product, and the bugs start at the core design with the ‘pretend yaml but actually an unholy mix of shell, js and json’ language.
The unfortunate truth is that this is where we are as a society. It doesn't reflect poorly on them. It reflects well. They're straightshooters. Theyre not afraid to speak candidly (your definition of candid may differ). They inject humor. You may not like it personally, but it doesn't reflects poorly even if it should.
We're at the tail end of a long decline.
Calling people monkeys and losers doesn't particularly tickle my sense of humor. If anything, it reminds me of Linus Torvalds from his toxic ages. Fortunately, he has matured well. Andrew seems like a smart guy, I hope that he will have the emotional maturity to realize that you can be no-bullshit and straight to the point without the need to call people names.
pretty sure there was no humor there, just looks poorly upon the author
It sure reads like it was meant satirically to me. Whether one finds it funny or offensive is up to the reader though, and I assume the GP is basically saying an article should be written such that "or offensive" isn't reasonably on the table.
We're past the point of civility when it comes to things like github and M$0FT's involvement.
Thankfully, many of us are not in that "We" group you're referring. This is a toxic culture I want no part of. It says a lot about the nature of the Zig community.
It's not only an announcement that they are moving out of GitHub.
It is a call to others to do the same.
They are also protective of the donation funds they receive, which has been wasted by defects in GitHub's CI.
And Microsoft... they acquire or partner with companies, then mismanage or make inferior clones of existing products, and make money out of it. That's their business model. SCP 86-DOS (MS-DOS), Apple Macintosh (Windows), Sybase ASE (SQL Server), IBM OS/2 (NT), Mosaic (Internet Explorer), and then acquisitions like Minecraft, Xamarin (dead), Skype (dead), GitHub, LinkedIn (sea of fake jobs and ghosting).
People don't buy their products by choice, they are trapped into them. You got Windows because your computer came with it and the software you use needs it, or you are forced to use it at work. You use MS Office because you have to use the MS Office format to collaborate with others, maybe at school or at work, or with the government (every government in the world has been lobbied to adopt their products). They tried hard to go further than this and failed, but they keep trying persistently. They failed to own the Internet (Microsoft Network), they failed to own the web (Internet Explorer only websites), they failed to own mobile (Windows Phone), now they are trying once with AI, going as far as taking snapshots of everything you do (MS Recall). Imagine being told your computer, bought with your own money, is no longer yours (MS Pluton, forced Windows updates, forced advertisement)... and even being happy with it or not caring about it at all... or getting to work every morning to make all of that happen... is not that what we would call a monkey loser?
My deep respects to Andrew.
Oh no! Anyways... I love zig and I'm glad they're moving off what GitHub has become, not least because enough high profile projects leaving might make them focus on what matters again.
They've abandoned GitHub for Codeberg because GitHub has ICE as a customer. Codeberg uses Paypal which is a member of the ICE "Virtual Global Taskforce".
https://www.ice.gov/news/releases/top-story-industry-partner...
There is a purity spiral that organizations can enter when they start doing this, which ends up with you shoving yourself into a cold dark corner of the internet and still not being completely detached from the badness because Cisco provides infrastructure for nearly every major weapons manufacturer and defense department globally.
You're mad because they left a vendor because they switched to a different vendor that you think is just as bad but also you're accusing them of starting an "inevitable purity spiral?" Which one is it?
It's not in conflict. They are pointing out that in this case their stated goal was not achieved so it's pointless.
It seems like every organization in America is compromised in some way if you dig deep enough. Certainly you can find reasons for every big tech. There's still a balance to be struck though.
when the shit finally starts flying there is no better place to be than low down, in a dark corner, with clean hands, looking nothing like a pig
> As a bonus, we look forward to fewer violations (exhibit A, B, C) of our strict no LLM / no AI policy,
Hilarious how the offender on "exhibit A" [1] is the same one from the other post that made the frontpage a couple of days ago [2].
[1] https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/25974
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46039274
oh god... he has a humongous AI generated PR for julia too https://github.com/tshort/StaticCompiler.jl/pull/180
I agree that's a funny coincidence. But, what about the change it wanted to commit? It is at least slightly interesting. It is doubly interesting that changing line 638 neither breaks nor fixes any test.
There's a tweet with a Claude screenshot with a bit more context (linked on the PR).
I don't know enough about the project to know if it makes any sense, but the Zig contributor seemed confused (at least about the title).
Perhaps the offset is always zero anyway in that scenario
But yeah hard to say
>MAJOR BREAKTHROUGH ACHIEVED
the bootlicking behavior must must be like crack for wannabes. jfc
>I did not write a single line of code but carefully shepherded AI over the course of several days and kept it on the straight and narrow.
>AI: I need to keep track of variables moving across registers. This is too hard, let’s go shopping… Me: Hey, don’t any no shortcuts!
>My work was just directing, shaping, cajoling and reviewing.
How people can say that without the slightest bit of reflection on whether they're right or just spitting BS
So much vague outrage over nothing. That CI system created by so called monkeys is the one of the best free CI service in the world. Not everyone has the millions of dollars like Zig Foundation to create their own CI servers.
After that they appreciate GitHub Sponsors, but say it is now a complete liability just because a project leader left. What are the actual changes? Any new rule? But no, it is now a "liability" and we should accept it.
Honestly speaking I like how big projects are exploring new hosting options. But there is no need to attack other platforms like this to promote your new host.
The only good thing about it is their very generous limits for "open source" projects (it doesn't even have to be free software AFAIK, just the source has to be visible to everyone).
The CI service itself is an absolute trash fire caused by the usual Microsoft NIH, and if they have financial means not to deal with it anymore, I see no reason for them to waste their limited development time on dealing with it.
Where else would the CI service for a Microsoft product be invented? NIH is a weird insult in this context. If Microsoft had instead acquired a CI service you’d be complaining about how they’re reducing competition.
They could have easily done that without all the insults.
I agree it’s unprofessional, but at least we’re talking about GHA, even if tangentially, because there’s a lot to talk about and not much of it is good.
> As a bonus, we look forward to fewer violations (exhibit A, B, C) of our strict no LLM / no AI policy, which I believe are at least in part due to GitHub aggressively pushing the “file an issue with Copilot” feature in everyone’s face.
Also, the big part of that issue is people are incentivized to make their GitHub profile look good to have a higher chance of getting hired. Any non-mainstream platform is not as compelling to get social credits.
Issues and Pull requests are only optional features . Open source projects could always use GitHub as just git host/mirror like how torvalds/linux is setup .
PRs are not optional: there is no way to disable them on GitHub. I can't be sure that this is intentional, but it certainly works out well for them that this is one of many properties which make it quite difficult to migrate away from the platform.
There's technically a way[1], but you'd have to do it every 6 months which is not great.
https://docs.github.com/en/communities/moderating-comments-a...
Yeah, that's actually what we've done on the Zig GitHub repository. However, it doesn't stop pushes to existing PRs, which isn't ideal; and, yes, it's quite hard to escape the conclusion that there being no "until I turn it back on" option is intentional.
I guess you could make a bot that closes any opened PR with a message that PRs are not accepted on Github and a link to the contribution docs.
Yikes, the PRs on the Linux repo are quite terrible. At least there's a bot to auto-reply with the correct procedure.
https://github.com/torvalds/linux/pull/1370
PRs aren't an optional feature, though acting on PRs is obviously optional; nothing prevents you from ignoring or (even automatically) closing all PRs from anyone who is not on a list of approved contributors.
Pull requests are not optional on GitHub. Users have been begging for more than a decade for an option to disable pull request for a repository, and GitHub continues to ignore them.
As another poster noted, you can disable it by limiting all interactions (6 months at a time). It is not ideal, but it does work to for PRs. You should also close all current PRs when you do that so users cannot push to those branches as well.
Not long back we were all urged to take CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md seriously. I've arrived at a place where the next thing I open source will include such a file which discusses not sending slop to the repository.
I don’t have strong opinions about Zig or Codeberg, but I find the self-described status of the latter’s infrastructure concerning[1]: they’re seemingly running faulty hardware in production with limited redundancy, and are actively soliciting more hardware of unknown quality/reliability/provenance from their community. This is cool for a hobbyist project, but it doesn’t scream “stable platform for a post-GitHub world,” which is how I’ve seen Codeberg (aspirationally) described.
[1]: https://blog.codeberg.org/letter-from-codeberg-onwards-and-u...
It seems like they have reliability issues; if I read their status page correctly, they have incidents every few minutes. Or how should one read their all green page?
Reading the infra part of the post made me smile, I spent part of my week putting workloads on spot but this is the real spot market. Chaos monkey is running in prod if you are ready for it or not.
Jokes aside, the technical depth it takes to make that one server run is impressive. That makes me more interested in codeberg, not less, though I’m going to keep my own mirror of the zig repo until they get some better hardware.
To be clear, I’m not knocking it; I also like to reuse old computers. But it’s incongruous with replacing GitHub, rather that being a “weirdo hobbyist” version of GitHub.
And yet the amount of work time I've missed out on from github being down is slightly concerning in retrospect. I imagine the smaller scale of codeberg will actually lead to more uptime despite chaos monkey's best efforts.
The numbers aren’t looking great so far[1]: they’re not cracking 3 9s on their primary service, and their CI/CD isn’t even cracking 2 9s. And these numbers are much better than when I checked a few days ago!
(This should not be read to imply that I think that GitHub’s reliability is acceptable; it clearly isn’t.)
[1]: https://status.codeberg.eu/status/codeberg
> Putting aside GitHub’s relationship with ICE, it’s abundantly clear that the talented folks who used to work on the product have moved on to bigger and better things, with the remaining losers eager to inflict some kind of bloated, buggy JavaScript framework on us in the name of progress.
This says more about the author than anything else.
The author of the article is the creator of the Zig language.
This is par for the course for him. He's quite a bit like Linus [1].
He needs to start following his own advice [2].
[1] https://mastodon.social/@andrewrk/112362751644363647
[2] https://andrewkelley.me/post/open-letter-everyone-butted-hea...
But they renamed the master branch, doesn't that excuse any ICE associations?
Very questionable decision.
You're running what aims to be a major programming language - have it where people expect and live with your gripes about the platform.
In retail you set up your store in the biggest mall with the most customers walking past - sure you can go set up in some back alley but don't expect customers to come to your store. This remains true even if the mall owns forget to mop the floor.
This feels immature and does not give confidence in the project/language leadership.
> You're running what aims to be a major programming language - have it where people expect and live with your gripes about the platform.
The core types who will make use of, contribute to, and/or otherwise use the repo likely don't need it to be on GitHub. Having it "where people expect" is useful for drive-by contributions but Zig doesn't really need that.
Furthermore, why should we as a larger community cede things to GitHub and Microsoft? It doesn't change unless larger parties move the needle.
None of this means that you have to be on a specific platform. GitHub as default/mandatory is a single point of failure for the entire tech industry.
For an example of another language that avoids being entirely coupled into Github, Go has it's real code hosting and CI interaction on a Gerrit instance, with some sync back and forth to GitHub for a few items.
The CI pain and operational blindness mentioned in the Zig post is entirely real.
Yeah but marketing matters for Zig because it's still struggling to get significant mindshare.
Zig needs to behave more mainstream rather than less and technical gripes about the source hosting platform should not matter more than marketing.
Eh. Their messaging is immature here, but you don't need to be on the biggest thing - especially when you have a limited set of contributiors, not millions.
It is deeply unfortunate that Git won instead of Mercurial and even more unfortunate that GitHub won. GitHub's code review/PR UI is an abomination. We had better tools 15 years ago and GitHub is still a regression. There are tons of reasons to move off it if you're willing to pay the cost of working with alternatives.
I wonder why they did not choose Sourcehut or were they on there at some point?
I think it's a broader cultural issue where everyone has to have strong opinions about everything and make a strong stand - instead of picking your battles
Not that I necessarily disagree with their reasoning, but stick to having strong feelings about your core "mission"? It just feels a bit "unstable". Hard to imagine such stuff coming from Java or Python or whatever other major language
> This feels immature and does not give confidence in the project/language leadership.
so making tough decisions is now immature this days lol.
> mall owns forget to mop the floor
quite a whitewashing i would say.
Calling the people who work on GitHub “losers” is not cool.
Look at the absolute state of what they are working on. If they are not losers, they are dispirited clock-punchers who don't care about their craft.
It’s more likely that most of them are competent professionals doing their best in an impersonal corporate environment, just like the rest of us.
Not all of us sold out to corporations.
Admittedly some of those may be a bit ... unusual. Like the guy who created TempleOS.
Unfortunately, some of us are stuck in a country which is a Microsoft shop, which makes it next to impossible to get into a Linux job - especially an entry-level one (these are basically non-existent where I live). I've even considered moving to a place where Linux jobs are a thing (Europe), but that would mean learning the local language first and also already having sufficient professional Linux experience (no one would hire a foreigner for an entry level role when they could just hire a local).
So unless you've got any bright ideas, I'm stuck in this Microsoft job till someone comes up with some magical Linux roles, or I start my own Linux-based company and twiddle my thumbs because there's no customers...
Gotta sell yourself to someone in this world. There’s no sense in demeaning someone about it.
They could also just be people with bills to pay who are maybe faced with—by some accounts—a very challenging employment market. Or maybe due to disabilities they find the process of finding new work difficult or impossible.
That is fine, but they adopt or delegate corporate opinions onto others. I feel that if you need to lie to people because of money, your job is not honest. (I don't mean you; I mean people who need to do this because otherwise they may lose their job etc...)
> I feel that if you need to lie to people because of money
Then your beef is with capitalism, not Github/MSFT.
Except for the "disabilities" part, which is problematic to classify, wouldn't your description broadly fit the word "losers"?
EDIT: I don't understand the downvotes. It's not a value judgement on Github employees, it's about the meaning of the word "loser". Go back to your teenage years. What's a loser? Someone, often through no fault of their own, keep being in a bad situation, having the "short end of the stick". What characteristically makes them losers is that they lack the audacity to snap out of it.
Isn't that an accurate definition of what "loser" generally means?
Github is migrating from their old infra to Azure. Doing migrations like that is hard, no matter who you are. And from a business and engineering perspective I think it makes sense to leverage the economies of scale of Azure instead of GitHub running their own boxes.
Anyone being forced to use Azure has, at least temporarily until they can find a new job, lost at life, not necessarily through any fault of their own. The poor souls probably also have to use Teams.
The engineers at github are getting paid $300k/year at SWE3 to do their job. I don’t think they lost at life.
Why bring people down so hard? That is really solid money and you can provide for a family, retire in your 40s, and it is work that does not destroy your body.
Spending your life working on making things worse (and knowing it) is pretty demoralizing. I know many people who have made the decision to take a pay cut or just quit when they realize that’s their job.
Sometimes those people aren't realizing that they're making things worse, they're just in a depressive spiral and can't see the other end, or see how much good is still being generated while other things are temporarily worse, or see that different tradeoffs have been made to make things worse in some ways and better in others. Just as people can delude themselves that they're always making a positive impact, people can delude themselves that they're making a negative one. The latter tends to be more costly, though, which can sure be annoying to those with a bias for a more cynical or pessimistic outlook...
Trying to ascribe positive/negative impact to strangers isn't usually a useful exercise, even if you have enough data to make a solid case. It can be cathartic -- imagine a different world where programmers making things worse would screw off and go do something else that's not programing! (I have a similar imagining, like of a world where programming is done by those who love it even outside of work -- even though I've worked with and helped hire excellent engineers who only treated programming as a job, they weren't my favorite to work with, and some were very much not excellent.) The best you can hope for is to trigger some self-reflection, and I do think that's important on an individual level. It's better to not make the world uglier, if you notice yourself doing so then you should probably stop, do something else, or figure out if it's at a level that you can compensate. A Richard Stallman quote I like:
"The straightforward and easy path was to join the proprietary software world, signing nondisclosure agreements and promising not to help my fellow hacker....I could have made money this way, and perhaps had fun programming (if I closed my eyes to how I was treating other people). But I knew that when my career was over, I would look back on years of building walls to divide people, and feel I had made the world ugly."
The absolute state of Github is that I use it dozens of times a day and it works flawlessly, for free, with intermittent outages.
Microsoft is doing more with Github than I can say for most of their products. I won't go to bat for the Xbox or Windows teams, but Github is... fine. Almost offensively usable.
> works flawlessly
> intermittent outages
Those seem like conflicting statements to me. Last outage was only 13 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45915731.
Also, there have been increasing reports of open source maintainers dealing with LLM generated PRs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46039274. GitHub seems perfectly positioned to help manage that issue, but in all likelihood will do nothing about it: '"Either you have to embrace the Al, or you get out of your career," Dohmke wrote, citing one of the developers who GitHub interviewed.'
I used to help maintain a popular open source library and I do not envy what open source maintainers are now up against.
GitHub: 60% of the time, it works every time.
Given the trajectory of Microsoft products it stands to reason Github’s future is uncertain. Also Git is ultimately a hosting platform that any competent software shop can recreate; the people behind the platform matter more than the platform itself.
True eventually, but not today
So you are ok with 2FA, right? If you contribute code there.
Now - what if you are not ok with it? What can you do?
> Almost offensively usable
I think you conflate two points here. One is how useable github is. The other is: control. At which point are you no longer ok with what a private company does? This is not solely about Microsoft alone by the way.
> intermittent outages
The outages have gone from "almost every Friday" to "several times per week".
I’m sure this isn’t directed at everyone that works at GH, but it would have been more tactful to fault the people making decisions. Those frustrations are real though.
Is it really a surprise that the project that declared a blanket ban on LLM-generated code is also emotional and childish in other areas?
A blanket ban on LLM-generated code is a completely reasonable position. If someone couldn't be bothered to write the code, why should anyone else bother to read it, let alone merge it?
Not wanting to review and maintain code that someone didn't even bother to write themselves is childish?
This argument obviously makes no sense. Especially when one of the examples is a 7 character diff.
But it's fine to say "this PR makes no sense to me explain it better please" and close it.
Denying code not on it's merits but it's source is childish.
It's absolutely possible to use an LLM to generate code, carefully review, iterate and test it and produce something that works and is maintainable.
The vast majority of of LLM generated code that gets submitted in PRs on public GitHub projects is not that - see the examples they gave.
Reviewing all of that code on its merits alone in order to dismiss it would take an inordinate amount of time and effort that would be much better spent improving the project. The alternative is a blanket LLM generated code ban, which is a lot less effort to enforce because it doesn't involve needing to read piles and piles of nonsense.
But to determine its merit a maintainer must first donate their time and read through the PR.
LLMs reduce the effort to create a plausible PR down to virtually zero. Requiring a human to write the code is a good indicator that A. the PR has at least some technical merit and B. the human cares enough about the code to bother writing a PR in the first place.
I think most people are in complete agreement.
What people don't like about LLM PRs is typically:
a. The person proposing the PR usually lacks adequate context and so it makes communication and feedback, which are essential, difficult if not impossible. They cannot even explain the reasoning behind the changes they are proposing, b. The volume/scale is often unreasonable for human reviewed to contend with. c. The PR may not be in response to an issue but just the realization of some "idea" the author or LLM had, making it even harder to contextualize. d. The cost asymmetry, generally speaking is highly unfavorable to the maintainers.
At the moment, it's just that LLM driven PRs have these qualities so frequently that people use LLM bans as a shorthand since writing out a lengthy policy redescrbiing the basic tenets of participation in software development is tedious and shouldn't be necessary, but here we are, in 2025 when everyone has seemingly decided to abandon those principles in favor of lazyily generating endless reams of pointless code just because they can.
I don't see how the two are related at all. A blanket ban on LLM-generated code is at least arguably a reasonable policy.
> A blanket ban on LLM-generated code is at least arguably a reasonable policy.
No, I don't think it is. There's more nuance to this debate than either "we're banning all LLM code" or "all of our features are vibe coded".
A blanket ban on unreviewed LLM code is a perfectly reasonable way to mitigate mass-produced slop PRs, but it is not reasonable to ban all code generated by an LLM. Not only is it unenforceable, but it's also counterproductive for people who genuinely get value out of it. As long as the author reviews the code carefully before opening a PR and can be held responsible, there's no problem.
Banning all LLM code doesn't mean they see things in binary terms like that. There is nuance between "all code must have 100% test coverage" and "tests are a waste of time", for instance, but that doesn't mean a project that adopts one of those policies thinks the middle ground doesn't exist.
No wonder they moved to Codeberg. Those kinds of projects tend to do the ol' move to Codeberg for whatever reason. If I had to put an analogy to it, Codeberg is like Kick and Github is like Twitch.
Purity testing. I mean, one of the first lines in their announcement is relating to politics.
You know what else isn't cool? Working at GitHub!
More seriously: I probably wouldn't have called every single current employee of GitHub a "loser", but more because I think truly cool people don't define themselves by where they happen to work at any given time. I'm sure the vast majority of people at GitHub are just tech employees trying to earn a living and don't particularly care whether the Zig guy thinks they're cool or not. What actually matters is that GitHub is a big centralized platform run by Microsoft for their own ends, and it's good to be free of it.
Holy shit, some people in the Zig community are toxic af. By extension, this means the community itself has issues it needs to face.
Not only have some of these folks - including the creator - been shitting in Rust threads, but here they're in here shitting on the awesome engineers at Github for no reason at all.
Good god.
edit: this is written by Andrew, the creator. The culture is rotten from the head.
Their "VP of Community" wrote this in 2020: https://kristoff.it/blog/addio-redis/ I didn't come across it until 2022. Still, particularly that and other writing from him and others convinced me the Zig community is full of goobers. That's not so bad, I have my tastes in immature humor and can sometimes be a goober too, but the application in that post's clearly-marked over-the-top skit still is just bizarre and doesn't encourage me to interact with them. To be more fair to the author and the community though, especially with respect to this GitHub migration, his more serious writing is better: https://kristoff.it/blog/the-open-source-game/ (2021). Some nice things said about Rust and the Rust community, even. In that he outlines a core position of "software you can love" being what he wants to create and inspire people to create, and how tents like "big tech" and "open source" don't really cater to that. The migration off of GitHub is predictable in the sense that GitHub stopped being something a lot of people loved a while ago -- of course some still love it, this tent creates obvious tension. (Though I don't know that Codeberg is any better and worthy of love. A few libraries I use have migrated to it and it seems fine at least, though them using Anubis is annoying and I've gotten the fail page of "Internal Server Error: administrator has misconfigured Anubis." a number of times. It does not spark joy in me.)
someone called some indeterminate anonymous corporate group of people who actively participate in enshittification of a product “losers”. you call that specific private individual “rotten”.
i’m really twisting my finger at the temple here.
You have accused me of "shitting in Rust threads". Do you have any evidence for this libel?
Libel LOL
Bro you need to go touch grass. There’s a whole world outside of online forums and programming.
Dude, you're constantly in Rust threads trying to show off Zig and badmouth Rust.
HN search isn't great, but you post in Rust threads all the time. Sometimes your only content is Zig code.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44390865
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11827608
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44262183
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26427726
There's much more of this.
I can't imagine being someone like Andrew, or any BDFL of a popular open source project, and having to deal with folks like this. Imagine posting a timed output of your compiler on a thread about a similar language's slow compiler and having someone cite this as bad behavior.
Anyway, the clear absurdity of this particular post aside, it's not OK to call other people monkeys. I make no statement on the quality of their engineering. But they're people! I'd hope to see a quiet dignity from the Zig folks here. They've done so much excellent work, and I'm sure it's frustrating to see what software can be and then have it sharply laid against what software often is. But kindness is always the way.
Thanks to everyone involved with Zig for their work and love of software!
> Imagine posting a timed output of your compiler on a thread about a similar language's slow compiler and having someone cite this as bad behavior.
That was the entirety of the contribution. It was gloating. And there is a long history of this.
There's open source contributions, and then there's this.
> Anyway, the clear absurdity of this particular post aside, it's not OK to call other people monkeys.
You don't see how the two are related?
It's completely fine for someone working on a programming language that is useful for some of the same things as Rust to compare that language to Rust, including in ways that make the language not seem as good. Indeed, this is useful information for someone who is using Rust and is considering using Zig (or vice-versa), or who is new to both languages and trying to figure out which is better for their use case.
You seem to be running a lot of interference in this thread.
In what way is the tone of the linked messages appropriate?
I'm not sure that your unsupported assertion represents a substantive contribution to this discussion. Why do you believe it's not cool, munchler?
It's bully behavior.
It reminds me of the creeps in school that punched me, shoved me into lockers, tried to assault me.
I almost killed myself as a kid because of bullies. Some people never grow out of that, it seems.
Hmm, that seems plausible, yeah. It's unfortunate munchler didn't say something like that. But it seems like now people on HN are dogpiling on this Andrew guy? I imagine he'll feel the same way reading this thread, won't he? Surely there's a solution for bullying other than more bullying?
Regardless, it's hard for me to imagine that many readers will find great intellectual interest in a long thread about what a terrible person Andrew is.
I'm happy to see the move. Codeberg is probably a more stable/long-term solution than SourceHut as the founder is slightly unhinged (but love what he has built). Honestly, either would have been great choices.
More opensource projects should move off GitHub. I moved off it myself.
I’m pretty sure Drew has stepped away from SourceHut. It’s kind of a bummer SourceHut stuck so stubbornly to mailing list only workflows. Everything else about the platform is great.
Drew is still working on SourceHut:
https://sourcehut.org/blog/2025-11-20-whats-cooking-q4-2025/
Thanks. My information was outdated.
I believe Drew was taking a "break" from it, but not stepping away in any permanent sense. It's probably better for him to stay involved. I'd like to see him push his idea further. It's great to have options.
I’m glad they have robust support for email based patching but it’s a hard sell for people getting in to the platform.
> I'm happy to see the move. Codeberg is probably a more stable/long-term solution than SourceHut as the founder is slightly unhinged
What's this about?
Maybe the incident:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41837782
https://dmpwn.info/
I'm confused, the incident is that he wrote a document detailing repeated bad behaviour from a well known community figure? And this is a bad thing?
And that second link is really grasping at straws lol
Holy shit this escalates completely. I had no idea any of this was going.
Is sr.ht tainted now or still a decent place to host code? I can't quite tell.
He's a bit unhinged, but for what it's worth every interaction I've had with him has been positive.
It's a defamation campaign done by 4chan bigots. See my sibling comment.
> dmpwn
Kinda horrible to see that the 4chan bigots use the same strategy to try to discredit drew devault, and implying things of ownership through their own created fake accounts and smearing campaigns. Pretty much all allegations on that page are circumstantial evidence, especially the bot ownership parts that sircmpwn even took down while citing those bigots using it to scrape child porn.
And then the dude of dmpwn posting things on image boards with the tag dmpwn, and forgetting to remove that from screenshots? lol, really?
Having experienced the same kind of doxxing attempts by 4chan bigots, /pol/ and kiwifarms, I think I am qualified to comment on how they operate.
Maybe someone needs to summon the Antichrist a second time to thin out the herd, huh?
Anyone who has read Drew de vault's blog for some time reaches the same conclusion it seems.
DeVault's controversial takes are pretty similar to the ones that Kelley expresses in this post, so I don't see much misalignment here.
PSA: Codeberg currently does not implement accessible account registration. It is impossible for screen reader users to make a Codeberg account due to the image-only captcha. There's a manual fallback path, but no idea how long that takes. I've been forced to use the Wikimedia one, and that was about 3 months. This has been pointed out to them many times, and it's seemingly not something they're willing to fix.
If you didn't know what Codeberg's political stance really is and how they treat the inconvenient part of their userbase... I guess now you know.
> This has been pointed out to them many times, and it's seemingly not something they're willing to fix.
On the exact page you're on is a link to an issue [0] acknowledging that the CAPTCHA is inaccessible and expressing that they plan to drop it (albeit with no concrete time-frame). I don't at all understand your argument that Codeberg must be slow at replying to emails (the "manual fallback path") because Wikimedia are; these are two completely unrelated entities and I don't see why you would make inferences about one from the other.
[0]: https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/Community/issues/1797
How is accessibility a political issue?
How is it not? In the not so distant past of the 1930s there were political parties advocating for the mass killing of people with disabilities, or at least the sterilization of those with heritable disabilities. There have been real campaigns in that period that did this type of forced sterilization, especially in some mental hospitals. You'll still find people espousing such beliefs, thankfully at the fringes for now.
Accessibility is the opposite position of that - but it's by no means a universally accepted good, unfortunately, especially when it requires extra effort to implement.
It greatly saddens me to see how little concern there is for accessibility for dev tooling. It says something about our industry that accessibility is often viewed as a “luxury” feature that can be dealt with once you’ve reached some level of success or revenue or whatever.
I’m hopeful AI tools can improve qol for those who require screen readers and similar tools but have a sinking feeling that it will only transfer even more of the burden for accessible access from operator to user.
I'm excited to see this migration happen, mostly because it signals to us (https://tangled.org) that large projects are willing to switch! We're working pretty hard to get Tangled out of alpha—we want it to be the place for free software communities.
Also recently wrote about our vision and commitment to indies and communities (and never enterprise!): https://anirudh.fi/future
Aside: Bluesky PDSes are configured to let you upload up to 100MB per blob. Perhaps it might be worth exploring as a medium for hosting release artifacts? Maybe the web interface can merge multiple blobs as fragments of large release files exceeding 100MB (or 15MB for PDSes using the out-of-box config which seems to be the case for Tangled’s instance)
You can already do this for tags, but manually. Via CI, you’ll need to set an app password and use goat (https://tangled.org/oppi.li/goat) or similar.
If voiced and channeled properly, I see very little chance of Microsoft and Github wouldn't prioritize fixes for a critical open source project.
Yes issues have been filed but more could be done back channel.
Personally - I think GitHub is a cultural artifact now. Of the entire planet. Hackers and curious minds from Japan to Alaska and everything in-between flock to GitHub.
Some of the best news I have read all week. We do not need to bend the knee to US megacorporations & proprietary code forges for open source. I hope this causes bigger discussions—especially including locking chat to platforms like Discord along the same lines.
You own the code, you decide where you want to host it. If anyone knows, I'm looking for copyrighted code to deploy my own cloned service to make some money, DM.
Translation ?
It is good to have alternatives to mega-corporations controlling the ecosystem.
Microsoft controlling GitHub is an issue, but one can see this issue emerging in different places too; see shopify puting pressure on the ruby ecosystem, ending with various developers who contributed to ruby (in particular via gems and bundler) no longer being accepted there (via RubyCentral's take-over, under shopify's directive and influence onto ruby). Many more examples can be given here. The thing is that money buys influence, ultimately dictating who can contribute and how. Python forcing mandatory 2FA onto all developers is also an example here - the hobbyist who just contributes code, has not really any benefit here, whereas corporations delegate more "security" onto unpaid folks.
Exhibit A is a github user joelreymont who seems to be making a habit of this behavior. He did a very similar spam on ocaml github.com/ocaml/ocaml/pull/14369
Reminds me of Blindsight by Peter Watts. Aliens viewed our radio signals as a type of malware aimed to consume the resources of a recipient for zero payoff and reduced fitness. This is the same.
Coderberg is nice , but their P80s are terrible. And they are hosted in Germany, which adds a few seconds to every remote command .
I wouldn’t move business critical repos there .
Everyone loses their mind when GitHub goes down once every 2 years . If codeberg provided SLas , they would probably breach them weekly
I wish GH had issues only every 2 years. That’d be amazing! We see issues weekly - if not near daily - at work. Personally I advocate for self-hosted GitLab. I like their pipelines a lot more than GH Actions too.
Every 2 years? More like every 2 days for GitHub Actions or Git operations those days :(
Grass is always greener.
> And they are hosted in Germany, which adds a few seconds to every remote command
Except, you know, if you live in Germany. Heaven forbid we get decent ping once in a while :)
You’re still going to get better p80s from GitHub , across the Atlantic
What are "P80s"? Given the context, I doubt this refers either to screens used in mineral processing or to home-built firearms, which are all that I see in the first couple pages of search results.
They probably mean 80th percentile of the response time distribution? Usually you see this talked about for P95 or P99
They haven’t yet reached that level of maturity
> when GitHub goes down once every 2 years
Uhh ... More like every two weeks there's some kind of incident.
I like Zig for the most part but this post does seem needlessly mean spirited. I don't like Microsoft or GitHub either, but I don't see the point of taking pot shots at the devs who work there.
For a while now I've been dual hosting my projects on both Github and Codeberg and adding a note in the README's [1] explaining the situation. I donate to Codeberg and run my own self-hosted forgejo runners for actions, and maintain much of my testing on both platforms.
I push to Github and then an Action mirrors the code to Codeberg automatically.
I'd fully switch over except practically everybody is on Github and nobody is on Codeberg, and I've had more outages with Codeberg than Github over the past year.
It really feels like there could be some good tooling in this area to make working through multiple Forge's easier and not force things to be centralized so much. Hopefully more projects moving out of Github makes it easier and gets more people contributing elsewhere.
[1] https://codeberg.org/arcuru/eidetica#repository
What do you find lacking in tooling in that regard?
I don't think there is all that much friction in distributing git, it's one of the easiest tools to have multiple remotes on. The auxiliary tooling is all open source too, so not much in the way of hosting your own, or for hosted platforms offering the services.
The social aspect of the hosted platforms is unlikely to ever be distributed because that is basically githubs only differentiation.
I think OP means multiplying n repos by m hosts and you get nXm assets out of sync , and lots of manual labor keeping track
A managed update service could work to replicate and then raise an error during conflicts . Call it “agentic” and you might get $75m
Damn - Codeberg is snappy! It's as fast as Github used to be 10 years ago. Server rendered pages. No AJAX-style slow updates. Love it.
This was the very first thing I noticed when we (the Zig team) started seriously trialing Codeberg. Honestly, the transition was worth it just for the ability to navigate the website without a 3-5 second wait every time I click a link.
Github is backend rendered too...
GitHub seems to be the worst of both worlds - partially rendered on the server, but then the frontend inexplicably pulls in additional data like... commit messages??
It's a double hit of latency, and for bonus points, the commit messages won't load at all if your browser is slightly out of date
It was. Open a huge diff in it now and go grab some dinner while your browser tries to render it.
I don’t hate GitHub or anything, but its UI is way slower now than it use to be.
I don't particularly like Zig, actually I don't like the language. But I have to admit, it's a bold move, free software projects should be encouraged to do the same.
I haven't really taken a step back to critically think about using GitHub as a platform until now, but I do agree with the points in this article.
While I like the idea of a more distributed repository environment, I will miss the project discoverability, social aspects, and centralization that GitHub offers. It'll probably be awhile before I make a switch, but I will eventually.
It's a pity that the GitHub repository is not mirrored, probably making downstreams broken.
Good move anyway.
For those like me who are obviously blind, the new location is at https://codeberg.org/ziglang/zig
To see this just as a hosting switch misses the bigger picture. This is the logical infrastructure conclusion of Zig's 'Zero Dependency' philosophy.
Zig spent years removing dependencies on the system C compiler (zig cc), removing dependencies on libc, and is currently working to remove the dependency on LLVM (the self-hosted backend).
GitHub was just another dependency.
For a project obsessed with reproducibility and toolchain sovereignty, relying on a single proprietary platform (and its changing ToS/AI policies) was a massive architectural liability. They aren't just moving repos; they are eliminating 'Platform Risk' the same way they eliminated 'Linker Risk'.
This is a valuable take tbh, I missed it.
Zig team ought to probably write about it in that manner.
Apart from his skills and Zig work, this guy sounds like an angry teen or Linus wannabe .His tone makes Zig look like a one egoistic man show even it is not.
So we’re calling our fellow programmers monkeys and losers now.
This post is gross and makes me think a lot less of Zig. Calling people losers and monkeys is unprofessional and unnecessary.
What's the main diff between the different repos? I would think whoever keeps the repo free of malicious code is the best. A big player like GH should have an advantage on that. Also not intentional malicious code uploads, but vulnerable code should be detected and reported to tyhe submitters.
Its sad to see people silently supporting Github monopoly. Any migration out of github should be encouraged. Decentalized, open-source systems should always be preferred over corporate walled gardens. Trusting Microsoft never ends well. The amount of infrastructure/projects/etc that stop with github malfunctions and have no fallback or operating mirror git is astounding. Github is eventually going to be enshittified and abandoned, so its fairly wise to spread projects into multiple(not just codeberg) synced mirrors where any server failing doesn't stop progress.
No idea if this is a big thing or not, but people don't like AI. Other than leaders who have been sold a promise, and the people charging for that promise.
Hopefully more projects can follow! Codeberg has a far more secure foundation to avoid unethical practices on users.
I for one am thankful for GitHub Actions, having free access to stateless automation and deployment scripts that's versioned along with code, running on Servers I don't have to manage has been a gift.
I don't miss anything from the dark days of managing self-hosted CI servers.
Also take a look at sourcehut for those interested in an alternative
Nice work
I tend to avoid projects that take tech decisions based on activism. It never signals a quality product.
Came hear and read “GitHub isn’t a good guy anymore” (not the first time, and seems to be increasing in frequency).
It’s like sourceforge all over again. History rhymes with itself, and enshitification has been added to dictionaries for a good reason.
As a once upon a time avid slashdotter, makes me wonder if some day, HN will go the same route.
I don't see this site as being the spiritual successor to /. at all, the audience is much more money focused and much less software focused. I miss /. as a low 5 digit user there.
I certainly think that this site has significant overlap with /., though of course not 100% the same. It feels crazy similar to me in fact, like stepping back in time to when I used to post there.
I am not sure it is like sourceforge. The UI of sourceforge was always bad. Github's UI is quite solid. I actually started to hate gitlab recently because of their UI. I always feel in utter confusion when it comes to gitlab.
Compared to installing Apache, Wiki, Roundup, CVS, and Mailman on your own server, SourceForge's UI was fantastic.
Codeberg has a yearly fee via euro payment method or manual wire transfer. Membership requires manual approval.
Edit: you can register without membership.
This is extremely misleading. "Membership" is about direct contribution to and influence over the non-profit; it'd be somewhat analagous to being a GitHub shareholder. The very first question on Codeberg's FAQ [0] makes this abundantly clear, as does the "Join" page [1]. I don't see any part of the website you could go to to get any other impression.
[0]: https://docs.codeberg.org/getting-started/faq/#what-do-i-nee...
[1]: https://join.codeberg.org/
Congratulations on the move!
> Thank you to the Forgejo contributors who helped us with our issues switching to the platform, as well as the Codeberg folks who worked with us on the migration
I'd love to see a writeup about these problems/solutions at some point.
Although it's not a writeup, most of the problems can be traced through this "moving-to-forgejo" meta-issue: https://codeberg.org/forgejo-contrib/moving-to-forgejo/issue...
Well, integrations are also important. Currently everything works first with Github (Codex, Claude Code, Linear, etc. etc.) so it's just easier. There's also Gitlab for people who don't like Github. Personally for what I do, Github does its job well, and the free private repos are great.
> remaining losers > created by monkeys
That just shows what kind of person they are, and makes me never want to use Zig, even hope for its failure.
That was quite the insufferable egotistical virtue signaling nonsense.
Do they actually think the folks who run Github are in charge or making typescript?
> Effective immediately, I have made ziglang/zig on GitHub read-only, and the canonical origin/master branch of the main Zig project repository is https://codeberg.org/ziglang/zig.git.
If there is one benefit in moving from GitHub it is certainly avoiding receiving AI slop issues on GitHub.
Github was on the decline anyway in the past 5 years, it's time for an alternative and we'll see. Would rather it being Codeberg over something like Sourcehut.
> Github was on the decline anyway in the past 5 years, it's time for an alternative and we'll see.
I tend to agree. But I don't see how an exact UI replica of Github is innovative.
I've only glanced at it though, maybe there's more features underneath the hood.
Happy to learn more about what makes it better. Is the CI system more refined than Github Actions? I was definitely never a fan of that system.
Biting the hand that fed you. I hope he's going to donate some of the money is getting begging to codeberg in return of their services.
you say this like it's some own or something, but I'd be more surprised if they didn't. believe it or not, they are already donating some of their funds to the upstream ecosystem[0].
[0]: https://ziglang.org/news/2025-financials/