Interesting to see this. I bought a book on Ada 2012 awhile back. Pretty cool stuff - especially with Spark.

The license model always made me uncomfortable for when you were using the commercial compilers though. Does this lock you into Spark forever?

>leaving Rust for Zig for the sheer enjoyment of using it instead.

What do people find more enjoyable?

> We run a fuzzing fleet of 1,000 dedicated CPU cores 24/7.

that a lot

Thank you Derek, such a pleasure to do this with you.

Are you guys using Zig?, love NATS by the way.

The reason for not choosing Rust still doesn't make any sense to me. If you don’t want to OOM, need correctness, are following the power of ten (where you aren’t allocating anyways), I don’t see the conflict or harm of additional enforced correctness.

Also, Rust does support checked arithmetic and has stable toolchains.

You can chip in remainder in soft monthly installments of $512 over two years.

For those who don't intuitively think in base 2,

2¹⁹ bytes, or 512KiB.

They have clients in many languages. But the zig repo is still just a placeholder. They often have bare bones servers in the languages too, like rust has one, but I think they are mostly for testing.

i asked gemini to investigate on my behalf, and it basically said that Synadia is to NATS what HiveMQ is to MQTT. seems fair enough.

thank goodness for llms to spare us the marketing drivel!

I assume it’s being budgeted out of their monthly cash flow, not coming out of cash reserves.

> Id assume a lump sum up front allow them to move faster with that money (hiring the right people sooner, etc.)

On the other hand, the monthly payments mean they’re less likely to overcommit their spending up front.

If they’re hiring someone with twice-monthly paychecks, receiving the money up front doesn’t make much difference unless they want to hire based on projections of higher future donations, which is a risky move.

This is a donation, not an investment in the VC sense.

Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast.

Most businesses prefer to make payments monthly because it's easier on cash flow.

There is always a burden of deployment of assets

I opened Shazam so I could look at the logos side-by-side, and it is indeed pretty odd how alike they are. Even the angle of the shapes is virtually the same.

It’s a little OT, but interesting nonetheless.

According to their financial statement, the Zig Foundation pays contributors $60/hr, and spent $154K on their single employee (Andrew Kelley) in 2024.

So that's around 3-4+ years of development.

(Also, that $154K might include significant employer expenses not typically included in salary, like, e.g. healthcare.)

https://ziglang.org/news/2025-financials/

Where can I get a $512k a year salary job?

I will work for 5 Yeats for 500k

No, it’s not.

More like 1 month. I'd even say it's a week for a competent one, and maybe a day for a 10x developer. These days it'll pay for maybe one hour of a HRT or Jane Street intern and maybe a few seconds of someone at renowned AI lab Cluely.

Joran from TigerBeetle here!

TigerBeetle actually already donated around ~$100K this past year. We just didn't announce it.

With revenue increasing, we wanted to increase our donation to the foundation to $128K per year going forward, and Synadia were keen to match. The only reason we announced it this time is to encourage other companies to join us.

Finally, as I wrote in TB's post [1], both companies have already donated the first installment, and Derek and I have also both been donating as individual donors in our personal capacity since around 2018.

Hope that clears it up for you! :)

Please join us and consider donating (or increasing your donation): https://ziglang.org/zsf/

[1] https://tigerbeetle.com/blog/2025-10-25-synadia-and-tigerbee...