Understanding Zig

Posted by connectFree Staff | December 3, 2019

The founder of Zig (Mr. Andrew Kelley) has made some serious yet unfortunately incorrect claims on the Internet about Zen.

This document will include these claims and provide facts that debunk said claims.

Reasons for Forking Zig

Before forking Zig, we as a company supported Andrew Kelley and the Zig language.

Where many corporate sponsors might only support via donations, we also supported Zig via our employees and also hired Zig contributors to make sure everyone was well paid.

At the time of forking Zig 0.3.0, the second and fifth largest contributors to the language were our employees.

Our employees wanted to spread the Zig language widely in Japan and throughout the world, but after great internal debate, we decided to fork the language due to the following concerns and reasons:

Documented lack of willingness to work with corporations
Lack of willingness to add new features to the language
Issues surrounding the Zig trademark
Development priorities and market demands

#1 Documented lack of willingness to work with corporations

Economically, we believe that computer language development and the developers behind such development should be backed by corporations in some formal way.

Many languages have died in the past due to lack of funding, lack of support channels and ultimately due to lack of corporate utility.

Mr. Kelley instead emphasizes that he would like to develop programming languages without corporate support.

Corporate sponsorship was abruptly abolished so that we could not send money and the Zig website now reflects its non-corporate ideals:

Reference #1

the project is accountable to the open source community rather than corporate shareholders.

Reference #2

Because of you, Zig is not driven by the needs of a business; instead it exists solely to serve the open source community.

Reference #3

Thanks to your support, Zig is unencumbered by corporate influence. It's a true open source project with quality standards higher than could ever be possible in a profit-minded business setting. -Andrew Kelley

We cannot see a future for Zig where the founder does not allow corporate entities to use and support Zig, so in respecting Mr. Kelley's ideals, we felt forced to fork Zig.

Fact: In addition to writing code, connectFree has written books, built training materials and have paid-out over half a million dollars so far to support the Zen language.

#2 Lack of willingness to add new features to the language

Although we will continue to keep the Zen Language as simple as possible, we think that interface functions (functions that realize polymorphism via traits and vtables) are absolutely necessary to write robust computer programs.

The interface function introduced in the Zen language was originally proposed for the Zig language, but this function proposal was not accepted.

We cannot see a future where Zig does not support traits or vtables, so in respecting Mr. Kelley's ideals, we felt forced to fork Zig.

#3 Issues surrounding the Zig trademark

When our legal department was reviewing the Zig ecosystem, we did a full due-diligence check. One of the larger problems that was identified was the Zig trademark.

"Zig" is the active registered trademark of Zig Media Group and Motion Arcade Inc. and as to our knowledge, not legally owned by Mr. Kelley.

This is an incomplete list of trademarks:

"Zig" Application number: 85450008 Motion Arcade Inc.
"Zig" Application number: 87976650 Zig Media, Inc.
"Zig" Application number: 87405087 Zig Media, Inc.
"Zig" Application number 017307307 Zig Media, Inc.

Since we could not see a future under the current name Zig, we felt forced to fork Zig.

#4 Development priorities and market demands

As a Japanese corporation, we believe that the Japanese embedded market is very promising and requires attention.

For this reason, we want to prioritize embedded development (such as a standard library that abstracts differences between real-time schedulers and various embedded boards) above all other development, but this also has a different language development purpose from Zig developers, so we found it best to fork Zig.

In Conclusion

Based on the above concerns and rational, we decided that it was difficult if not impossible to continue supporting the Zig language under the leadership of Mr. Andrew Kelley.

Direct response to Mr. Andrew Kelley's claims

Claim #1: Zen is not correctly attributing work under Mr. Andrew Kelley.

False. The Zig language is distributed under the MIT License. We distribute a file called ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.md in each distribution of the product and also display these ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS via the zen legal command where we promptly display among other open-source licenses the following:

## Andrew Kelley (Zig)
The MIT License (Expat)

Copyright (c) 2015 Andrew Kelley

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy
of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal
in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights
to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell
copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is
furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in
all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR
IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,
FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE
AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER
LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM,
OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN
THE SOFTWARE.

Please note, the Zen Language is licensed under the CONNECTFREE REFERENCE SOURCE LICENSE (CF-RSL).

The MIT License also gives licensees the direct right to sub-license the code, which we have so done.

Claim #2: Zen is a direct copy of Zig with a new name

False. The authors of Zen are Zig contributors with a deep history in the Zig language. After forking Zig, a number of fundamental improvements to the language were made. These include:

A revamp of the type system and a jump to C++17
Re-engineering the comptime system to be structurally sound (beware, Zig has bugs).
A complete revamp of the Error system.
Multilingual support
The interface keyword, which implements trait and vtable support for the language.
A new standard library that implements functionality based on the interface system.
Cryptographically Signed Release Binaries
We have written several books about the Zen language and provide corporate support to our customers.

Claim #3: Zen's Standard library LICENSE file must include Zig's LICENSE file

False. Zig's license is already acknowledged in ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.md and zen legal.

Zen's standard library was re-written by connectFree to support the interface system and is not the same as Zig's standard library.

Claim #4: connectFree retroactively tried to claim copyright on independent contributions to Zig

False. Code that was written for Zen by a connectFree employee was accepted into the Zig repository.

A pull-request was submitted by the original author to correct his mistake in uploading the copyrighted material.

No such retroactive copyright claims exist; only claims on code that was written by connectFree without acknowledgement.

Fun fact: many backported patches to Zig have originated from Zen and connectFree:

Public Opinion

Since Mr. Kelley has decided to make his opinions known publicly, a number of individuals have countered his claim publicly:

I don't see how they're a bad actor. The MIT license was created to allow proprietary derived products with little connection to the original, for example X11 on Unix workstations.
— Ian McKellar (@ian) December 2, 2019

The website mentions explicitly in Japanese that it's a fork from zig 0.3

It also says they were sponsoring Zig's development and that the second and different most contributers to zig are employees of ConnectFree pic.twitter.com/CaID1QahnI
— Hasen Judy (@hasen_judy) December 3, 2019

チラシ裏。

ZenとZigのお家騒動がTLに流れてきたが、あまりに下品過ぎてZigには失望した。外から見れば、ああいう嫉妬深いコミュニティだから、forkされてしまったり、引き抜かれホイホイされたり、人が離れていくんじゃないかねえ。
— isVowel (@isvowel) December 3, 2019

Zen