Why should anyone have a look at TigerBeetle, a bleeding edge accounting system built with a language no one understands? Since no one understands Zig, no one will be able to maintain TigerBeetle. The company is exposing itself to a great deal of risk with this decision. Adopting TigerBeetle is a colossal business mistake, not an engineering mistake.
Coincidentally, one of the reasons we picked Zig was for how readable it was, and strikingly so, even for high level programmers who might not understand systems programming or C. Because Zig reads like TypeScript, and we were working in payment switches where the majority of programmers could read that. This particular switch, in fact, had this same business requirement, that programmers should be able to at least read the systems language.
But generally, our experience has been that people who understand C will understand how to maintain Zig [0]. Zig's toolchain is also more accessible, and across all platforms. Zig's compiler is already being used by Uber for hermetic builds.
It's also easy to learn. You can pick up Zig in a week and be comfortable in a month. Zig has a simple grammar. I love how, when we have someone join the team, we never have a discussion about how to learn Zig, as if it's a difficult language to master (like C++!). Rather, there's excitement around learning the language, even ahead of starting at work, and within a day or two they're committing.
We made this decision for TigerBeetle in July 2020, and didn't take it lightly. We had already followed Zig's progress for 2 years by that point, and many factors were considered [1][2][3]. C was the other contender, given that we had to handle memory allocation failure.
The crux of the decision, then, was whether to invest in a systems language of the last 30 years, or in a systems language of the next 30 years. A distributed database is a big investment. It made sense to invest for the future. If anything, it would have been a colossal business mistake to have picked C or C++, which would have crippled our development velocity.
Furthermore, for TigerBeetle's design goals, especially w.r.t. our adoption of NASA's Power of Ten Rules for Safety-Critical Code and thus static memory allocation, Zig made (and continues to make) the most sense.
We also liked the efficient performance culture surrounding Zig, with talented game developers like Michal Ziulek and Stephen Gutekanst, and embedded programmers like xq, Matt Knight, Jens Goldberg and others moving to it. These industries (gaming, embedded) are often a good litmus test of where systems programming is at.
More details (our thinking on Zig through the lens of safety/performance/tooling/ecosystem/hiring/marketing) here:
Fascinating info, thanks for sharing this with all the details! Didn't watch your youtube video but do you use any formal systems like TLA+ internally for validating your designs?
