Zig Software Foundation 2024 Financial Report and Fundraiser

180 points by quic5 1 year ago | 38 comments
  • emidoots 1 year ago
    Myself and many others are betting on Zig in major ways, I truly think it has a bright future ahead.

    In spare time, myself and a few others are working on a game engine in Zig[0], and the Zig core team has been very receptive to addressing issues our project faces and supporting us.

    Others are working on pixel art editors[1], open source 2D RPG games[2], there's a group of independent folks working on a 3D massive immersive sim game[3], a group working on making Zig an amazing language for micro-controllers[4], etc.

    Please consider donating $5-10 a month to the ZSF! They are a great group of people, and it has so many knock-on effects for others in the FOSS community. :)

    [0] https://machengine.org/

    [1] https://github.com/foxnne/pixi

    [2] https://github.com/foxnne/aftersun

    [3] https://github.com/Srekel/tides-of-revival

    [4] https://github.com/ZigEmbeddedGroup

    • jmull 1 year ago
      As someone who's been contributing $10/mo for a couple years, I'd like to see AK and contractors paid more.

      It's great to see the dollars spent so frugally (they are paying something like 60-65% market of average devs) but this is a long-term project so sustainability cannot be ignored. Sooner or later contributors will face tough life choices.

      Obviously, that means slower development unless funding shoots up for some reason, and 1.0 already seems far away, but I think otherwise there's too high a risk that it never happens or happens in an ultimately un-useful way.

      Anyway, I always thought this project was valuable (that's why I started supporting it), but since I've been following it, I've found I also like the way it is run so I guess I should put my money where my mouth is... I just went up to $15/mo.

      I honestly can't predict whether or not this will succeed, but I'm pretty sure it's worth a try.

      • sitkack 1 year ago
        We are all better off for Zig existing, even if we don’t directly use it. That is why I donate. The information density being in the Goldilocks Zone is a masterful quality of the Zig society.

        I am going to both increase my donation and figure out how to hookup my corporate matching, didn’t know that was possible.

        Base for everyone!

        • pid-1 1 year ago
          > We spent 92% of our money in 2023 on paying contributors for their time.

          That's really cool. Sometimes I think about donating to the PSF, but I don't really care about PyCon.

          • AndyKelley 1 year ago
            I think PSF is a particularly well-run organization. When founding ZSF, I modeled it directly based on PSF, right down to the name and mission statement.

            I think it's no coincidence that Python is one of the most popular programming languages in the world.

            • Argorak 1 year ago
              Unless something has drastically changed, PyCon covers itself and earns the PSF quite some money on top. Here are numbers from 2020:

              https://thefortunate.blog/diversification-is-the-future-for-...

              > Out of USD4.5MM of revenue for the PSF in 2019, around 63% of it came from PyCon. USD1.9MM was the costs of having PyCon, which means that for every dollar spent on PyCon, the PSF gets back 1.50 dollars.

              https://pyfound.blogspot.com/2020/03/psfs-projected-2020-fin...

              Obviously, the revenue has sharply dropped for a time because of COVID, but I'd be surprised if PyCon is run at a loss nowadays.

              So you can assume none of your sponsorship money goes to running PyCon.

              • hiccuphippo 1 year ago
                These organizations should really let users direct their donations toward specific goals. I'd love to donate to Firefox but not for Mozilla to use the money on something else. It would also let them see what people values most and help them prioritize.
                • lifthrasiir 1 year ago
                  This kind of suggestion is indeed pretty common for all kinds of governments and organizations, but would be disastrous or useless for many reasons.

                  For example, Firefox the software project depends on many other essential components that are not strictly a software project but Firefox can't survive without them---developer and test infrastructures, addons.mozilla.org, localization platform (Pontoon) and so on. And there are more nuanced projects like Rust and Servo that might shape the next decade of Firefox. And yet there are technically uninteresting but financially positive projects like Pocket Premium and VPN, which started to provide a significant portion of the revenue [1] and represents a less dependence on Google's search royalties.

                  Requiring specific goals only makes sense when donors exactly know all those dependencies---an unreasonable assumption. In fact, if a majority of the revenue came from such donations, it would be very disastrous. Thankfully for Mozilla, it doesn't depend too much on donations (~2% of the total revenue in 2022), but then those donations don't mean much financially anyway.

                  There are alternative schemes as well. For example, donations may have wishes that are not guaranteed but to be explicitly considered (I think Vim did so for a long time). This is better than enforced goals, but not without a problem because significant donations would affect developers regardless of the acceptance anyway.

                  [1] https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2022/mozilla-fdn-202... (Specifically "Subscription and advertising revenue", which accounted for ~13% of the total revenue in 2022)

              • geodel 1 year ago
                This is extremely impressive. With about no support from software industries' heavy hitters, they are able to run quite successful foundation and project.

                Few days back there was topic "Rust contributor's burnout" here on HN. I understand it maybe a sensitive topic but from outside it feels contributors working on Zig seem generally happy and excited about their contributions. And I think this is more important than number of features crammed or 1.0 release deadline committed to.

                • infamouscow 1 year ago
                  I'll be increasing my Zig donations as a result of making the financials very transparent and easily accessible.

                  The Zig Software Foundation is very organized and has their stuff together. Hopefully other languages follow the ZSF's lead.

                  • nbittich 1 year ago
                    I wish the rust foundation could write articles like that, no corporate legal bullshit.
                    • nindalf 1 year ago
                      Weird. Here's the Rust Foundation annual report for 2023 (https://foundation.rust-lang.org/static/publications/annual-...). No "legal bullshit", it's short and to the point.

                      Or here's another example. An interview they published with one of the developers whom they awarded a grant to. He worked on a Rust implementation of git and was awarded the grant to integrate it with cargo, the Rust build tool. (https://foundation.rust-lang.org/news/community-grantee-spot...)

                      Or a technical article about artifact signing (https://foundation.rust-lang.org/news/2023-12-21-improving-s...)

                      Do you still think that the Rust foundation writes "legal bullshit"?

                      • AndyKelley 1 year ago
                        Thanks for sharing this. I would be interested to see a more detailed pie chart on the 2023 expenditures. Approximately half the expenses (1.5 million dollars) spent on "Membership & Admin". What does that mean exactly?
                        • timClicks 1 year ago
                          Hi Andrew, as per https://rust-lang.zulipchat.com/#narrow/stream/335408-founda...

                              To answer your question, the "Membership & Admin" slide covers:

    - General admin (software, bank fees, meeting rooms etcetera)
    - Legal and professional fees
    - Marketing services & tooling
    - Events (travel and sponsorship, primarily the latter)
    - Salaries, benefits, payroll taxes, & payroll service provider fees.
    - Membership and donor acquisition
                          • timClicks 1 year ago
                            I'll ask in Zulip if a more detailed breakdown is available. Inferring by exclusion from the other categories, it's likely the cost of the staff, such as payroll, travel and related expenses.
                          • nbittich 1 year ago
                            Yes, they lost me in the trademark drama.
                            • timClicks 1 year ago
                              That's a silly thing to get upset about. It was a draft proposal written by volunteers outside the Foundation.
                        • matu3ba 1 year ago
                          A more recent example of excellent work with Zig on improving state of the art parsing can be seen in this fine presentation of a SIMD-heavy project: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oN8LDpWuPWw. It shows SWAR-techiques for embedded devices to be used in place of SIMD are useful + feasible and missed out LLVM optimizations on non-x86/x86_64 besides technical background and theory on simplified examples.
                          • xcdzvyn 1 year ago
                            It's very interesting to see Uber betting on Zig, let alone the income it generates. This certainly benefited my faith in Zig's long-term sustainability.
                            • the_duke 1 year ago
                              They are "just" using the toolchain though, not the language

                              > Uber uses Zig to compile its C/C++ code.

                              > Uber does not have any plans to use zig-the-language yet.

                              https://jakstys.lt/2022/how-uber-uses-zig/

                              • lifthrasiir 1 year ago
                                This is in fact a good strategization for the ZSF because Zig kinda needs all the work for `zig cc` anyway but `zig cc` can be sold without Zig itself. The next question is then, why something like `zig cc` didn't exist before? It's more complicated to answer...

                                Traditionally cross-compilation needed a separate copy of everything per target, which is really annoying but not really impossible. Any large enough company would therefore just build an infrastructure and put dedicated employees for cross-compilation. Tools like `zig cc` would benefit the rest---smaller companies and individuals---but you can't really expect those to kickstart the development of such tools from the beginning. Thankfully, `zig cc` was born as a byproduct so it had time to mature within the Zig project. And given we now have a working `zig cc`, larger companies can consider `zig cc` and possibly donate to the ZSF, even if that's only for `zig cc`.

                            • nindalf 1 year ago
                              I really hope Zig succeeds! Of all the languages out there, I think it's the closest to achieving the goal of being C, but without the avoidable footguns. Rust is great too, but is different enough that I can imagine a future where both Zig and Rust easily succeed.

                              I hope they're able to raise the money they need to fulfil their ambitious roadmap!

                              • jonahx 1 year ago
                                "Some of this cost is for hosting ziglang.org. Since our free AWS credits have expired we have plans to switch to Fastly which should save about $500/month."

                                Just curious why a static site would cost so much even on AWS? Would it be many downloads of large-ish binary files?

                                • AndyKelley 1 year ago
                                  Yes it's primarily bandwidth costs for the binary tarballs. People fetch directly from ziglang.org in their CI scripts and don't use caching. It would be nice if people would try to use caching and mirrors more.
                                  • anotherhue 1 year ago
                                    Hat tip to you sir. May I suggest checking out Cloudflare R2 - they don't charge for egress.
                                • binary132 1 year ago
                                  I have a hard time justifying faith in and donation to Zig when I don’t see reaching production quality as having a high priority for the project over the years. I am hopeful that will eventually change and it will some day even be able to compete with C, C++, and Rust.
                                  • trashburger 1 year ago
                                    They have very ambitious goals, I think it's okay to give them the benefit of the doubt for a bit. Keep in mind that Rust took over 9 years to reach 1.0, and C took about 19 years to be standardized.
                                  • synergy20 1 year ago
                                    I never understand why fundamental work which is super hard to do got paid so little, the whole budget of Zig might be less than an average senior software developer's salary at a FAANG company, this does not make sense to me at all.

                                    On the other hand, what's the timeline for 1.0? I might stick with C and C++, but always glad to see Zig to succeed.

                                    • acedTrex 1 year ago
                                      What doesn't make sense about it, it doesn't directly drive an increase on a budgetary line item. Of course no one in finance areas is going to pay attention to it
                                      • strikelaserclaw 1 year ago
                                        In a capitalist economy, high pay doesn't equal challenging / hard work or even valuable work. If you exist where the money is being funneled, you will get paid a lot even if you barely contribute.
                                        • stephc_int13 1 year ago
                                          Capitalist or not this is still true.

                                          Capitalism is a relatively recent invention with a narrower definition that what most people think.

                                          In any case, wealth and power distribution is highly related to network effects. Regardless of skills, being a servant of kings will give you more wealth and power than being a free individual in the desert.

                                          • generalizations 1 year ago
                                            Seems like in general, money is directed towards leverage, and that leverage can be either a carrot or a stick. Positive leverage is providing value to others - a product that's priced according to how much people want it (unfortunately this is orthogonal to how much effort is involved), so you have leverage to demand cash in proportion to that; negative leverage is someone simply able to demand money from you, for various reasons, in various ways, with various types of possibly-physical leverage.

                                            I don't think that's a capitalist thing to say, it just seems to be in the nature of game theory. Building something technically difficult doesn't really have any bearing on how much value can be demanded in return.

                                        • ksec 1 year ago
                                          >got paid so little,

                                          What part of this is hard to understand? They dont earn as much and they are spending it as wisely and as efficiently and as high as they could afford while they are willing to work for.

                                          • colesantiago 1 year ago
                                            If you've seen salaries in Europe and in the UK, it's more of a joke.

                                            Even interns and junior engineers in the US earn more than in Europe.

                                            I don't think this will change any time soon.

                                            • sph 1 year ago
                                              Apples and oranges. Total cost of living is very different between EU and the US.

                                              This is such a common and controversial topic of discussion I wonder why you're trying to derail a Zig thread with such offtopic bait.

                                              • anotherhue 1 year ago
                                                Dublin to NYC transplant speaking, I'm still 3xing because of the salary difference.
                                            • 1 year ago