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hubie [soylentnews.org] writes:

Zig prez complains about 'vibe-scheduling' after safe sleep bug goes unaddressed for eons [theregister.com]:

The Foundation that promotes the Zig programming language has quit GitHub due to what its leadership perceives as the code sharing site's decline.

The drama began in April 2025 when GitHub user AlekseiNikiforovIBM started a thread [github.com] titled "safe_sleep.sh rarely hangs indefinitely." GitHub addressed the problem in August, but didn't reveal that in the thread, which remained open until Monday.

That timing appears notable. Last week, Andrew Kelly, president and lead developer of the Zig Software Foundation, announced [ziglang.org] that the Zig project is moving to Codeberg, a non-profit git hosting service, because GitHub no longer demonstrates commitment to engineering excellence.

One piece of evidence he offered for that assessment was the "safe_sleep.sh rarely hangs indefinitely" thread.

"Most importantly, Actions has inexcusable bugs while being completely neglected," Kelly wrote. "After the CEO of GitHub said to 'embrace AI or get out', it seems the lackeys at Microsoft took the hint, because GitHub Actions started 'vibe-scheduling' – choosing jobs to run seemingly at random. Combined with other bugs and inability to manually intervene, this causes our CI system to get so backed up that not even master branch commits get checked."

Kelly's gripe seems justified, as the bug discussed in the thread appears to have popped up following a code change [github.com] in February 2022 that users flagged in prior bug reports.

The code change replaced instances of the posix "sleep" command with a "safe_sleep" script that failed to work as advertised. It was supposed to allow the GitHub Actions runner – the application that runs a job from a GitHub Actions workflow – to pause execution safely.

"The bug in this 'safe sleep' script is obvious from looking at it: if the process is not scheduled for the one-second interval in which the loop would return (due to $SECONDS having the correct value), then it simply spins forever," wrote Zig core developer Matthew Lugg in a comment [github.com] appended to the April bug thread.

"That can easily happen on a CI machine under extreme load. When this happens, it's pretty bad: it completely breaks a runner until manual intervention. On Zig's CI runner machines, we observed multiple of these processes which had been running for hundreds of hours, silently taking down two runner services for weeks."

[...] While Kelly has gone on to apologize [ziggit.dev] for the incendiary nature of his post, Zig is not the only software project publicly parting ways with GitHub.

Over the weekend, Rodrigo Arias Mallo, creator of the Dillo browser project, said he's planning to move away from GitHub owing to concerns about over-reliance on JavaScript, GitHub's ability to deny service, declining usability, inadequate moderation tools, and "over-focusing on LLMs and generative AI, which are destroying the open web (or what remains of it) among other problems [wikipedia.org]."

Zig [ziglang.org] is a general-purpose programming language and toolchain for maintaining robust, optimal and reusable software.

Original Submission