The development team behind the Zig programming language has announced that it is leaving GitHub after ten years. The organization is moving its central repository to Codeberg, a non-profit Git hosting service.
According to project leader Andrew Kelly, the decision was made due to ongoing technical issues, especially within GitHub Actions.
One of the examples Zig cites is a bug in the safe_sleep.sh script, under certain circumstances used 100 percent of the CPU and would not stop. According to reports by The Register, the original bug report on this issue was opened in April 2025 but was not closed until December 1, 2025, even though the actual fix had already been delivered in August.
The Register also points to the bug’s origin. This was a change made in 2022 whereby the script safe_sleep replaced the POSIX command sleep. Under heavy load, this script could hang, rendering runners unusable until someone intervened manually.
Zig states that such problems were becoming increasingly common in GitHub Actions and that the platform scheduled tasks unpredictably. Combined with the lack of intervention options, this led to a CI chain (continuous integration chain) that regularly crashed. The foundation indicates that investing in additional hardware to compensate for these delays was not desirable.
Zig prohibits LLMs
In addition, the Zig Software Foundation’s own policy plays a role. The organization has a strict ban on the use of LLMs and generative AI. GitHub is integrating more and more AI components into its platform, which, according to Zig, leads to undesirable interactions. By switching to Codeberg, the foundation hopes to create an environment that is more in line with that policy.
The switch to Codeberg also affects the project’s financial structure. GitHub Sponsors was an important source of income for the Zig Software Foundation for many years. However, the organization now considers this dependency risky and is asking donors to transfer their recurring contributions to Every.org, also a non-profit. The existing sponsor benefits within GitHub are being phased out and will be made available again via Every.org.
The migration to Codeberg has now been completed. The GitHub repository is in read-only mode and the official source for the Zig code has been moved to Codeberg. Existing issues and pull requests will remain on GitHub. New issues will start on Codeberg from number 30000 to avoid confusion. The developers will continue to handle open items on GitHub.
Codeberg is growing rapidly
Meanwhile, Codeberg is showing clear growth: the number of supporting members has doubled since the beginning of this year to more than 1,200.
With the switch, Zig aims to create a more stable, predictable development environment, without dependence on GitHub’s technical choices or commercial priorities.