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> On Aug 12, 2025, at 7:51 AM, Willow Liquorice <[email protected]> wrote: > > This is true, shame g-w1 isn't on 9fans AFAICT. I've emailed him about his > moribund Zig contributions. > > Stripping Plan 9 out of the linker is understandable, but that doesn't make > it any less disappointing. > > Here's why I say "the feeling is mutual": > > I find Zig's lack of API stability guarantees, combined with its erratic > release cadence, particularly paralysing right now. I really want to work on > making Zig more portable: the low-hanging fruit (issues #9828 and #17807) of > eliminating its LLVM dependency (#16270). I understand the frustration. They do not wish to stabilize until they’re happy with the design. And the changes they keep making while unstable (pre-1.0) seem warranted. It’d be worse if they weren’t already forthcoming about the instability but it seems well-understood. > > Writergate is on nightly, and so a mountain of breaking API changes will > come… at some unspecified point in the near future, because today was Zig > 0.15.0's release target, but there are still issues blocking the release. > > It's rather demotivating to find that the relevant APIs for your software > project have a shelf life comparable to most foodstuffs. Yeah it’s a bit ironic that 9front and Plan 9 are relatively stable and low-risk — assuming that zig is modular enough to handle platform/OS specifics non-disruptively. One wonders if Andrew and others are thinking about refactoring the linker bits and wanting to get rid of “special cases” they don’t need to carry in order to move forward. And then there’s the problem of continuous integration tests against 9front/plan 9. What does Go do? Rely on the community to find and fix breaks? That’s not the most ideal situation either. Anyway it’s a zero cost investment to maintain quality and if the returns aren’t high enough — people won’t do it. > > - Willow > >> On 12/08/2025 01:04, David Leimbach via 9fans wrote: >> In fairness… he said the work was never completed and the maintainer is MIA. >> I’d do the same thing. >> Zig has a small audience. Plan 9/9front has a small audience. The >> intersection? Yikes! >> Could some of it be worded differently? Sure. >> Sent from my iPad >>>> On Aug 11, 2025, at 5:00 PM, Willow Liquorice <[email protected]> wrote: >>> >>> I've been keeping an eye on Zig and noticed this recently-merged branch >>> from Andrew Kelley, removing support for Plan 9 executables in the linker >>> (https://github.com/ziglang/zig/pull/24803). >>> >>> "Not worth the maintenance burden." >>> >>> I suspect the feeling is mutual right now, given that Zig code rots very >>> quickly if it uses the stdlib. >>> >>> I read Ron Minnich was able to get Zig building through vmx acrobatics. >>> That process is unaffected by the merge as, IIUC, it targets a Linux VM. >>> This is a blow to self-hosting Zig on Plan 9, though. >>> >>> - Willow >>> >>> P.S. "The operating system is not that interesting" my foot! ------------------------------------------ 9fans: 9fans Permalink: https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/Ta74fdc99bf0151a0-Mf401e854874fed43d99986e9 Delivery options: https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/subscription
