Are there other notable commercial companies/projects than Tiger Beetle relying on Zig? According to public information, Tiger Beetle are about eight employees with a single customer, isn't it?
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I'm not sure how many customers that Tiger Beetle have but I really hope they are successful. It would be great to see such a quality focused engineering org make it. They are basically doing what many devs really want to do - make the highest quality and fastest stuff possible - instead of banging out random features that usually no one actually cares about. I don't have a use case for their tech right now, but the moment I have a need for anything in the vicinity I'll be checking it out..
Thanks! Joran, CEO from TigerBeetle here!
We’re doing pretty well as a business already, contrary to Rochus’ comment, which is not accurate.
Our team is 16, we have $30M in investment, and already some of the largest brokerages, exchanges, and wealth managements, in their respective jurisdictions are customers of TigerBeetle.
We have a saying:
“Good engineering is good business, and good business is good engineering.”
At least in TigerBeetle’s experience, the saying is proving true. We really appreciate your support and kind words!
Thanks for the clarifications.
May I ask what made you use Zig instead of e.g. Rust or C++ (or even Ada/SPARK)? I assume Go would be too undeterministic for real-time applications?
Go doesn't belong in this discussion.its a better java, c#, python and not much more. It doesn't work for 24/7 or for performance sensitive applications.
> Go doesn't belong in this discussion.its a better java, c#, python and not much more. It doesn't work for 24/7 or for performance sensitive applications.
The claim is factually backwards. Go significantly outperforms Java, C#, and Python (~10x faster than Python, lower memory usage than C#), and runs successfully in countless 24/7 production systems including high-throughput APIs and distributed services.
The actual valid concern, which made me question its suitability, is that Go wouldn't be appropriate for TigerBeetle's specific real-time requirements. TigerBeetle is a financial transaction database requiring deterministic, predictable microsecond-level latencies with strict timestamp ordering across a distributed consensus protocol. Go's garbage collector introduces unpredictable pauses that would likely violate these hard real-time guarantees.
Bun.sh uses zig for large portions of native code.
Thanks for the hint. According to public sources, Bun's runtime infrastructure and bindings are written in Zig, but it uses Apple's JavaScriptCore engine written in C++ (i.e. Zig is essentially used in a thin wrapper layer around a large C++ engine). Bun itself apparently struggles with stability and production readiness. Oven (Bun's company) has around 2-10 employees according to LinkedIn.
Been using bun from years, it's as stable as alternatives from a long time.
Who is that single customer? I'd have thought by now there would be more.
And there are.
lightpanda and bun
Lightpanda looks interesting, thanks for the hint. According to public sources, behind the development is a company of 2-10 employees (like Bun). The engine uses parts of the Netsurf browser (written in C) and the V8 engine (written in C++), and - as far a I can tell - is in an early development stage.
> The main idea is to avoid any graphical rendering and just work with data manipulation
Which makes the engine much smaller and less complex than a "normal" browser.