300k USD Donation Pledged by Mitchell Hashimoto
October 01, 2024
The donation is structured in two 150k USD payments, one due right away, the second one year from now.
Over the last couple of years the Zig project has grown significantly both in terms of adoption and number of contributors, to the point where the amount of development activity has outpaced the amount of donations we are getting.
We currently have a rapidly growing number of PRs that need to be reviewed, and a list of core contributors qualified to do the work, but not enough funding for billable hours in order to fully meet demand.
We are thankful to both individual donors, and the companies that have adopted Zig and wisely decided to invest in the long-term sustainability of their software infrastructure. These donations are fundamental in allowing us to continue advancing the state of the art in compiler infrastructure.
On our side of things, the Zig Software Foundation has always been extremely attentive to ensuring that the money you donate is used efficiently.
Just last week we moved away from AWS in order to nip in the bud growing cloud infrastructure costs and, even before that, more than 90% of our income has consistently gone toward paying contributors for their time. This is not something that should be taken for granted, as it's easy for non-profit organizations to incur disproportionate amounts of operational overhead.
Given this context, we are currently uniquely primed for making immediate and effective use of donations that enable us to provide continued employment to core contributors.
Using Mitchell's donation we'll be able to to offer Jacob Young a full time schedule. As a reminder, he's the primary author of the C backend, x86 backend, LLDB fork that adds Zig support, and maintains the eZ80 toolchain on the side, all without even having the ability to bill full time yet!
Thank you Mitchell for your financial support, your excellent writing about Zig, and, most importantly, for already realizing in Ghostty the vision of a better future for software that we set out to pursue with the Zig project.
I would like to use this opportunity to thank Bun and TigerBeetle for supporting financially not only ZSF but also ZigTools, the community initiative that supports the development of ZLS, among other things.
I would also like to thank ZML for joining the aforementioned list of Zig early adopters and becoming a ZSF sponsor earlier this year.
UPDATE: Here's Mitchell's own post: https://mitchellh.com/writing/zig-donation
Kind regards,
Loris Cro