Note: This is a draft – and is not polished or fully elaborated. I would have liked to spend much, much more time on this throughout my absence – but other factors have forced my hand to release this earlier than expected.
Letter to the Community:
Hello to you all. It has been a while – hasn’t it? That does not make it an easier for me, or anybody else to acknowledge or discuss what has been said or done – and I think it is important to discuss things, resolve them and ultimately move on so that we can become better as people. It is the nature of progress to push forward and to set aside differences and work together for a better future. I think that even though wounds heal, we will have scars, and that nobody fully can undo everything simply.
I’ve been absent from the community after drama from this particular project, although I should give context that this is not the only issue that resulted in my absence. Unfortunate personal matters and despair, general exhaustion, and life circumstances are and were a large factor in this decision to leave, and drama here was the tipping point. I realize that my own personal issues were not isolated to myself and came through in my public and private conversations as aggressive, overly arrogant, and left a bad taste behind. This is solely my fault and I should have been more observant of my own behavior in this regard. I have taken a lot of time in this absence to think about my ideas, my future, and to resolve some of these conflicts in my personal life. Given that I feel that I have resolved some of these issues, I think it is appropriate to begin staging my return and to make peace with what has happened before this.
I do honestly believe that it is regrettable that this conflict started in the first place, and it is mostly my fault in this. I should have been more receptive to help and more willing to work with others to resolve issues. I think that some patience would have resolved my concerns and I should not have taken it as seriously as I did. While I do still hold some reluctances, I am willing to acknowledge that it was not acceptable to publicly disparage the Rust project as a competition. I also will say that personal attacks made were not called for and I apologize to those individuals, especially sofa. Although harsh, I think he did make some good points – and some which I should also address.
Zig PSP is a passion project, and while it started as a project designed to ask “is it possible?” it also shifted in its idea. Initially I wanted to test and see if this language could run on – and be viable on – the PSP. As such, it was deeply ingrained with Rust-based tools and libraries to help jump-start the project. However, with progress came a desire to make it something more and I internally viewed it as something that could be a viable alternative. I still believe Zig is a viable and excellently designed language, and if anything, I love this language more after spending hours using it. I think that my desire to make it something as “superior” to Rust-PSP drove a lot of tension and caused issues – and I apologize for taking that attitude.
Rust PSP is a great project, and though I had limited influence in it, it did not have limited influence on me. It made me critically think about the actual genuine possibilities of more languages than C/C++ on the PSP and I very much wanted to bring more languages that I personally found interesting. I do a lot of the work I do on the PSP because of genuine intrinsic motivation to explore ideas and see what is possible. I did not, nor will I, work on projects for some extrinsic clout or monetary interests. I do everything for the purpose of learning, knowledge, and contributing to this community. It is regrettable that my attitude towards Zig-PSP did become more so about competitions and ‘beating’ others, and I apologize for that.
As for plagiarism and copyright matters – Zig-PSP’s foundation as an experiment based on pre-existing tools certainly was not suitable for what I am trying to make it – and it clearly did draw a lot of inspiration from Rust due to the dependency upon it. I should have been more careful of these ideas and should have transitioned away from being a “carbon copy” of sorts. I apologize for the premature removal of the Rust-PSP license while it still depended upon it. I will be re-instating the license for the purposes of making peace and as an acknowledgement of the role Rust had in the beginnings of the project, which will have been added by the time of this posting. I also will be adding a special thanks section to the README for this. I think it would be VERY important to point out that at the time of the arguments and issues, that Zig was indeed no longer dependent on libpsp.a – and is no longer dependent on it in ANY capacity. It also makes sure to remove any references to Rust’s codebase, and while it still will bear some resemblances, these will be taken care of in time. Currently as of the release of this letter, Zig-PSP is fully self-hosted, does not use libpsp.a, and has a majority of all user libraries with the exception of graphics, which is work in-progress. It does not reference Rust’s linkfile and has its own dedicated workarounds to issues not based on Rust.
Before ending this letter, I wish to sincerely ask for forgiveness of the community for my past actions and behavior. I hope we can find a common ground and walk forward together as better people with our common love for the PSP. I hold no ill-will and hope that we can set aside our differences.
Sincerely,
Iridesence / Nathan Bourgeois