AI Policy and Governance

AI policy

Upstream Zig bans LLMs from issues, patches, and bug tracker comments. Zig++ welcomes them. The first Zig++ language feature, private fields, was implemented, tested, and documented by Claude, and the commit is signed that way.

Zig++ is also building AI code generation into the build system. Today that is Zigger, a package that adds a zig build gen step: it reads SPEC.md, runs the Claude CLI to implement it, runs zig build test, feeds any failures back, and repeats until the tests pass (up to 10 times by default). With -Dtdd=true it writes failing tests first. The plan is to make this pipeline part of std.Build.

The goal: by September 2027, all new Zig++ code is written through the Zigger pipeline.

Governance

Upstream Zig is BDFN (Benevolent Dictator For Now). Zig++ is BDFL: Matthew Neel is the Benevolent Dictator For Life and has final say on the design and implementation of everything.

Zig++ has no Code of Conduct. It has one rule: talk about code. Issues, pull requests, reviews, and comments are for the compiler, the language, the standard library, and the tools. Everything else, politics included, is off topic and will be closed.

Language proposals are welcome. Zig++ is made of them.

Contributing

The source, the issues, and the pull requests are at github.com/mattneel/zigpp. CI builds Zig++ with a bootstrap devkit and runs, in this order:

build-bootstrap/stage3/bin/zig build test-fmt
build-bootstrap/stage3/bin/zig test lib/std/std.zig -lc
build-bootstrap/stage3/bin/zig test test/behavior.zig
build-bootstrap/stage3/bin/zig build test-cases -Dskip-non-native -Denable-llvm
build-bootstrap/stage3/bin/zig build test-standalone -Dskip-non-native -Dskip-release

The standalone tests include the GPU suite: its kernels compile for NVIDIA and AMD GPUs, and it skips itself on a machine without a GPU driver.

Building from Source has the same bootstrap the CI job uses, so a change can be tested against the compiler CI builds.