Statement Regarding the Zen Programming Language
Hello HN and sorry for this bizarre drama!Although we have a page documenting some outlandish comments that the founder of Zig has made about Zen[0], we find it well inside of our rights to fork the MIT Licensed Zig and make a better product with commercial support.We had initial plans to support Zig in Japan, but efforts to localize Zig were not accepted and we could not take the risk of not having some sort of formal role.Regarding commercializing compilers: our main market is in embedded and as others have pointed out, charging for compilers and support is not uncommon.One of our big main differences between Zig is that Zen natively supports vtables and traits that we call interfaces[1].Although our core market is in Japan, we are preparing our English website and hope to have it out soon.On a more personal note, I am happy that Zig is growing and that they got the foundation together. At the peak before the fork, I was the 5th largest contributor to Zig, so I am very happy to hear when people say that they are enjoying the language.It's midnight in Japan, but I will try to field questions if any.[0] https://zen-lang.org/zig/
[1] https://www.zen-lang.org/ja-JP/docs/ch06-interface/