Mitchell Hashimoto pledges another $400,000 to the Zig Software Foundation

Mitchell Hashimoto, the developer behind Vagrant, Terraform and the Ghostty terminal, announced on June 21, 2026 that his family is pledging another $400,000 to the Zig Software Foundation (ZSF). The new commitment lifts the family's total pledged support for the foundation to $700,000, after an initial donation in 2024.

A two-year structure, as in 2024

The pledge is split into $200,000 per year over two years, the same structure as the earlier donation. The money goes to the non-profit foundation that funds work on the Zig programming language and its compiler toolchain.

Why Zig keeps his support

Hashimoto wrote that Zig continues to earn his respect both as a technical project and as a community. He pointed to the project's 2026 development log as evidence of steady progress on the hard problems of building a language and a compiler, and to initiatives such as Loris Cro's Contributor Poker and Zig's ban on AI-generated contributions as signs of a deliberate approach to maintainership and community.

He also addressed the renewed public discussion of Zig's strict no-LLM contribution policy, which resurfaced in the context of Bun's Zig fork and its rewrite in Rust. Hashimoto said he has no problem with what Bun did and considers Bun a great project, but that what stood out to him was how quickly participants villainized one another and how much of the debate lacked empathy for other viewpoints. He noted that he uses AI heavily himself, has written about his AI adoption and about shipping real features with AI assistance, while also arguing for a rational view of the technology's capabilities and criticizing its negative impact on open source.

Respect without full agreement

Hashimoto made clear that his own opinions do not fully align with the foundation's approach, and that he still holds the people, the policies and the project in high regard: open-source projects can set unusual boundaries and build their own culture. He called Zig ambitious, practical and unusually serious about quality, and said that Ghostty exists in large part because Zig made it possible for him to build the kind of software he wanted. He closed by asking readers to consider donating to the foundation.