108 points by smlavine 7 hours ago | 7 comments
zapnuk 1 hour ago
Kudos to bun for investing in a promising technology.

Does the Zig Foundation have a policy against corporate sponsors?

Otherwise the lack of sponsoring from the "big players" seems rather shocking. You'd think that zig has a decent chance in helping MS/Meta/Google/etc. somewhere along the way.

kristoff_it 1 hour ago
> Does the Zig Foundation have a policy against corporate sponsors?

Not at all. We would be definitely open & happy to learn that one of the big companies are using Zig and would be interested in supporting us.

(but we don't plan to give up board seats)

anigbrowl 5 hours ago
A masterclass in clear writing and transparency. I wish all nonprofits were like this.
unclad5968 5 hours ago
I know literally nothing about business accounting or business taxes. Why does the expenses include both the employee's compensation and also their taxes? Do businesses claim their employees taxes as expenses?

Very cool to see such a detailed report about finances.

AndyKelley 5 hours ago
Hello, I am the author of the post.

The expenses listed here are accounting for 100% of the expenses paid by the organization. If you go fetch the 990 from the IRS and look at the totals, it will match dollar-for-dollar, cent-for-cent. So if I deleted taxes from this report, you would hopefully all be wondering, where did that $13,089.07 go?

Happy to answer any other questions.

Edit: I see the question is about income tax vs payroll tax categorization. As this isn't my area of expertise and it's getting late, I'll wait until tomorrow to check carefully and make any necessary clarifications.

throwawaymaths 4 hours ago
i think the question is more of "is that payroll/employment tax"? the way it's written uses the word "income tax" carefully noting the distinction. you may want to edit it to say "payroll tax", which makes more sense.
unclad5968 4 hours ago
I think I understand from the other comments. I never considered that it is technically an expense to withhold the income taxes of employees and then pay it to the IRS.
te 3 hours ago
I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that number is not actually employee income tax, even though the report seems to suggest the same. Employee income tax is an expense of the employee, not the employer. If it is income tax withholding, it's way too small for $150k+ of employee comp, which is another reason I don't think it's that. Instead, I expect this tax line item to be primarily the employer share of FICA tax, which is typically considered a payroll tax instead of an income tax.
shrubble 2 hours ago
In the USA at least, the employee pays taxes on their wages and the employer, also pays some taxes on the employee wages as well.
stock_toaster 5 hours ago
hervature 4 hours ago
At a very high level, revenues enter your bank account and expenses leave your bank account. In this case, you are getting confused about the taxes. There is employee compensation (which the business will withhold taxes on behalf of the individual) and then payroll taxes (which the employee is not responsible for). In essence, "their taxes" is not the correct classification. The business pays the employee (and facilitates the tax collection) and also pays the tax the business owes.
TkTech 4 hours ago
Been awhile since I employed anyone in America (that whole "we're going to annex you" thing) but if I had to hazard a guess, it's the company's portion of their FICA taxes? The company withholds the employee portion to remit to the IRS, then matches it dollar to dollar. If the company is structured so that Andrew is self-employed, it'd be SECA instead and you can count that portion as a business expense.
IshKebab 45 minutes ago
Wow, paying himself $150k after tax from donations! That's wildly more successful than I would have guessed. (Not saying it's undeserved.)

> we need more recurring donations

Damn... really? More than $170k/year from Github Sponsors? That's got to be the most successful Github Sponsor income ever right?

smlavine 6 hours ago
Related recent news, the 0.15.1 release with the start of some IO changes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44964701
WhereIsTheTruth 4 hours ago
> CI & Website $14,986.73

What a waste of money, seriously

AndyKelley 3 hours ago
For comparison, in the same year Rust Foundation spent $567,000 on this category - more than ZSF's entire expenses for everything. That's 38x more money.

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

modernerd 3 hours ago
The report says that includes two full-time infrastructure engineers. Which isn’t crazy given Rust infrastructure’s userbase and traffic.

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

anonfordays 2 hours ago
>That's 38x more money.

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

epolanski 2 hours ago
> Rust gets at least a 1000x more usage than Zig

1. I highly doubt your ballpark estimate.

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

testdelacc1 16 minutes ago
I don’t think that ballpark estimate is that far fetched? Usage isn’t a reflection of the merits of the two languages. Rust is simply older. It reached 1.0 10 years ago, and it is further along the adoption curve. Zig is yet to reach 1.0 and has mostly early adopters like bun, TigerBeetle and ghostty. I have no doubt that usage will substantially increase once Zig reaches 1.0.

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

> CIs don’t scale with the number of users

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

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

timeon 15 minutes ago
In every Zig thread, someone needs to mention Rust /s.
sroerick 3 hours ago
This would not be wildly out of place for a small to medium business running a business card website. On the high end, certainly, but not unheard of.

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

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

kristoff_it 1 hour ago
It's also the one-time cost of buying some machines, not just renting.
weavie 35 minutes ago
There are projects that spend more than that every day.
Galanwe 1 hour ago
Zig CI runs all compiler stages, I guess that's why. Does not seem crazy to me.
pabs3 2 hours ago
Meanwhile, Debian spends $0 on CI, buildds, website, package distribution. Its all donated by hardware/CDN/hosting partners.
kristoff_it 1 hour ago
So in practice money is effectively being donated (donating hw is not free) to be spent on CI, not very differently than in our case, but you're delighted to not know the numbers and like to imagine it's $0. Ok :^)
dns_snek 2 hours ago
Zig team didn't want to be beholden to the whims of outside sponsors which is an understandable position.
OsrsNeedsf2P 3 hours ago
Given they bought their own machines to not perpetually pay cloud infrastructure...
epolanski 2 hours ago
How so?
DrNosferatu 1 hour ago
What’s the role of LLM coding on Zig?