TigerBeetle and Synadia pledge $512k to the Zig Software Foundation

Summary

Synadia and TigerBeetle have together pledged $512,000 to the Zig Software Foundation over the next two years in support of the language, leadership, and communities building the future of simpler systems software. I first saw Zig in 2018, seven years ago. Two years later, I chose Zig over C or Rust for TigerBeetle. In 2020, I was following Rust closely. At the time, Rust’s default memory philosophy was to crash when out of memory (OOM). However, for TigerBeetle, I wanted explicit static allocation, following NASA’s Power of Ten Rules for Safety-Critical Code, which would become a part of TigerStyle, a methodology for creating safer software in less time. What I learned is that if you could centralize resource allocation in time and space (the dimensions that prove tricky for humans writing software) then this could not only simplify memory management, to design away some of the need for a borrow checker in the first place, but, more importantly, also be a forcing function for propagating good design, to encourage teams to think through the explicit limits or physics of the software (you have no choice). From a performance perspective, I didn’t want TigerBeetle to be fearlessly multithreaded. Transaction processing workloads tend to have inherent contention, even to the point of power law, precluding partitioning and necessitating a single-threaded architecture. Therefore, Rust’s borrow checker, while a phenomenal tool for the class of problems it targets, made less sense for TigerBeetle. TigerBeetle never frees memory and never runs multithreaded, instead using explicit submission/completion queue interfaces by design. Finally, while the borrow checker could achieve local memory safety, TigerBeetle needed more correctness properties. TigerBeetle needed to be always correct, and across literally thousands of invariants. As matklad would say, this is a harder problem! I had also spent enough time in memory safe languages to know that local memory safety is no guarant...