This programming language is quitting GitHub

The Zig Programming Language is officially quitting GitHub and moving its main repository over to Codeberg. The reasoning is a collapse in engineering quality and an aggressive push toward artificial intelligence tools. It is the most direct shot at Copilot from a developer I’ve seen in some time.

Andrew Kelly, the president and lead developer of the Zig Software Foundation, said in an announcement that the countdown started ticking the moment Microsoft acquired GitHub seven years ago. He said the biggest problem was that the priorities and engineering culture had completely rotted, leaving the platform feeling sluggish and broken thanks to bloated JavaScript frameworks.

The breaking point for the foundation seems to be GitHub Actions. Kelly called its bugs inexcusable and noted the feature is being totally neglected. He specifically pointed to reported statements from the GitHub CEO that told the company’s workers, “Either you have to embrace the Al, or you get out of your career.”

The team noticed that GitHub Actions began what they call “vibe-scheduling,” choosing jobs to run seemingly at random. This, combined with other bugs, caused their continuous integration system to get so backed up that new commits, even on the master branch, were not being checked. Rather than spending donation money on more CI hardware just to work around the crumbling infrastructure, Zig has opted to switch hosting providers entirely.

Kelly pointed specifically to a long-standing issue with the ‘safe_sleep.sh’ script. This script was implemented in February 2022 to replace the basic POSIX ‘sleep’ command. The goal was to let the Actions runner safely pause execution. The bug in the code was obvious: the script would use 100 percent CPU and run forever if the task didn’t happen to check the time during the exact one-second interval when the loop was supposed to return.

Zig core developer Matthew Lugg noted that this is easily triggered on CI machines under extreme load. On Zig’s CI machines, they observed multiple processes running for hundreds of hours, silently taking down two runner services for weeks.

This shift also directly targets GitHub’s (and ultimately, Microsoft’s) AI obsession. The Zig Software Foundation holds a strict no-LLM and no-AI policy. The foundation feels that GitHub is aggressively pushing tools like “file an issue with Copilot” right in everyone’s face, leading to policy violations within the project.

GitHub Sponsors may be the reason that many don’t want to leave, and why we haven’t seen a mass exodus yet. That product was key to Zig’s early fundraising success and still makes up a large chunk of its revenue today.

The Zig project has already made the move permanent. The GitHub repository is now read-only. The new canonical repository is hosted on Codeberg, a non-profit Git hosting service. They chose a simple migration strategy to avoid vendor lock-in. They are leaving all old issues and pull requests on GitHub, but new issues will start at number 30,000 on Codeberg to keep the numbering unambiguous.

This move isn’t isolated. The creator of the Dillo browser project is also planning a departure, citing concerns over JavaScript reliance, declining usability, and the platform’s heavy focus on LLMs and generative AI.

It seems GitHub’s focus is clearly on monetization through Copilot, which Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says has over 15 million users and accounts for roughly 40% of GitHub’s annual revenue growth. I think sacrificing the core developer experience for AI revenue is a mistake that will cost them the trust of major projects.

Source: Ziglang via The Register