Junon, you are mistakenly assuming that a language that aims to be safe has to prioritize safety all the way from inception to maturity. Right now Zig has much, much, bigger priorities than safety.
The language is not yet production-ready for almost every production use-case, and that should not be a surprise to anybody that has looked into it a bit. We even had somebody make a "Using Zig in Production" talk that started with a few jokes on how he decided to do so despite Andrew publicly saying that it's too early.
Right now docs, tooling, the self-hosted compiler, making design decisions on corners of the language not yet finalized, getting more contributors, getting funding to speed up development (and give back to contributors), and building up the community are all needs with an immensely higher level of priority.
On the last point, the community, since that's my job, I'll spare a couple more words: "the" discord community doesn't exist. The Zig community is decentralized and anyone is free to start their own space, as stated in the Community wiki page of the project https://github.com/ziglang/zig/wiki/Community
So when it comes to Discord servers, at the moment of writing there are two listed in that document: the older, bigger one, and mine. You are probably talking about the bigger one, where I can see your discussions with other members. From what I can see in the logs, the discussions were calm and reasonable. I also don't see any of the insults that you refer to in your other comments. In case I missed them though, you'd need to raise the problem with the moderators of that space, and not chalk it up to 'the community' being a cult. This is very different compared to how Rust runs its communities btw.
I'm sorry, but from what I can gather in your case you simply had strong opinions on specific topics and other people just disagreed with you, partially for design (i.e. non strictly technical) reasons. From what I can see from your other comments in this thread, my only recommendation is to work on being more dispassionate when approaching a new community and when issuing PRs (btw a good way of avoiding doing useless work is to open an issue first or to find Andrew / other core contributors on IRC and get their opinion). At the end of the day Zig is an opinionated project where Andrew gives the final approval on what the language should or should not be. By missing that nuance, you built up expectations that in the end were unmet, resulting in understandable frustration.
That said, from my PoV, this doesn't justify excessive criticism of Zig and its community.
As for debating changes and raising criticism, we do that too, but to do that successfully you need to understand more the nuances in the history and design of Zig.
The problem is that safety means, by definition, ruling out unsafe code at compile time or run time. If you don't prioritise safety early then you run a high risk of discovering when you try to retrofit safety later that you need to rule out a lot of existing code. Even if you haven't promised stability, breaking existing code hurts the ecosystem.
Therefore when setting priorities for language evolution it seems better to identify work that is less likely to result in breaking code, and prioritise safety over that.
Your are correct, yet general statements. The situation in the Zig ecosystem right now is not one based on "retrofitting" security into the language, but, if today we don't have a function that sanitizes utf8 in the standard library, that doesn't mean that the language is going to become a swiss cheese in terms of security.
Please read Andrew's answer and check the linked project management dashboard on GH.
The language is not yet production-ready for almost every production use-case, and that should not be a surprise to anybody that has looked into it a bit. We even had somebody make a "Using Zig in Production" talk that started with a few jokes on how he decided to do so despite Andrew publicly saying that it's too early.
Right now docs, tooling, the self-hosted compiler, making design decisions on corners of the language not yet finalized, getting more contributors, getting funding to speed up development (and give back to contributors), and building up the community are all needs with an immensely higher level of priority.
On the last point, the community, since that's my job, I'll spare a couple more words: "the" discord community doesn't exist. The Zig community is decentralized and anyone is free to start their own space, as stated in the Community wiki page of the project https://github.com/ziglang/zig/wiki/Community
So when it comes to Discord servers, at the moment of writing there are two listed in that document: the older, bigger one, and mine. You are probably talking about the bigger one, where I can see your discussions with other members. From what I can see in the logs, the discussions were calm and reasonable. I also don't see any of the insults that you refer to in your other comments. In case I missed them though, you'd need to raise the problem with the moderators of that space, and not chalk it up to 'the community' being a cult. This is very different compared to how Rust runs its communities btw.
I'm sorry, but from what I can gather in your case you simply had strong opinions on specific topics and other people just disagreed with you, partially for design (i.e. non strictly technical) reasons. From what I can see from your other comments in this thread, my only recommendation is to work on being more dispassionate when approaching a new community and when issuing PRs (btw a good way of avoiding doing useless work is to open an issue first or to find Andrew / other core contributors on IRC and get their opinion). At the end of the day Zig is an opinionated project where Andrew gives the final approval on what the language should or should not be. By missing that nuance, you built up expectations that in the end were unmet, resulting in understandable frustration.
That said, from my PoV, this doesn't justify excessive criticism of Zig and its community.
As for debating changes and raising criticism, we do that too, but to do that successfully you need to understand more the nuances in the history and design of Zig.
https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/6600 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=880uR25pP5U