10 ms·

Interview with Mitchell Hashimoto about Ghostty and Zig

405 points by veqq 3mo ago

skhameneh 3mo ago
> I don’t like the Rust culture. There’s no better way to put it. This is just so weird to me, because I would say the same about Zig. I tried to get into Zig even chatted with Loris Cro when he was streaming. I was looking to explore what my Rust project could look like in Zig but there were features simply missing that I couldn't do without. The entire interaction was mostly about how bad Rust is and how I could just do something different in Zig (completely misunderstanding my ask, with little interest to explore my actual requirements). I remember watching HN and seeing every time there was something Rust related trending, there was ALWAYS a post made shortly after trying to hype Zig and this went on for like 4 years. I'm not a Rust contributor and I don't care for some of the challenges that come with Rust, but I love what it accomplished and I find it does it very well. Back then I found the Rust community had interest and respect for Zig, so the discourse was very much one sided.
- nixpulvis 3mo ago
  Culture wars are sadly one of the biggest inhibitors of progress throughout all of technology.
  - ori_b 3mo ago
    Why does liking something different from you imply there's a war?
    - hoppp 3mo ago
      There is often a neo-tribalistic mentality. "My tribe is better than your tribe" Some people thrive inside this mentality, whole others don't go near it. Not everyone is thinking like this but a lot of people do. So because of that it's a common heuristic to think of it as "war" because there are some people who do that gladly.
      - flohofwoe 3mo ago
        In computing this is almost a tradition (Commodore vs Atari vs PC, Windows vs UNIX vs MacOS). It hasn't exactly hindered progress, I'd rather call it healthy competition ;) Still though: Amiga 4 ever! :D
    - nixpulvis 3mo ago
      It doesn't and I never said anything about preferences directly. There are however culture wars, and they cause problems throughout the industry and discipline.
    - juudjjsa 3mo ago
      [flagged]
  - ks2048 3mo ago
    It seems to hinge a lot on what is “culture”.
    - pstuart 3mo ago
      "my tribe"
  - dbetteridge 3mo ago
    You could just have left off the last part of that :D > Culture wars are sadly one of the biggest inhibitors of progress
- pron 3mo ago
  > This is just so weird to me, because I would say the same about Zig. Then why is it weird if you're saying the same thing? Different programming languages appeal to programmers with different tastes, and so it makes sense that some programmers would be drawn to language X and dislike language Y, while others would be the opposite.
  - nine_k 3mo ago
    Maybe it's even the other way around: different cultures and tastes give birth to different languages and community norms around them.
    - skhameneh 3mo ago
      This is a good take. I was interested in accomplishing my goals and had an interest in both Rust and Zig. Going in, Rust was already proven to meet my needs and I was exploring Zig. Everything being centered around anti-Rust and “better than Rust” without meeting my needs made it a non-starter, it got in the way of discussing the languages themselves.
      - garbagepatch 3mo ago
        When was this? I've only seen this "anti-rust" vibe in the past few weeks, guess triggered by the Bun rewrite. Zig people usually will tell you to use the right tool for the job over shilling the language or that you don't need to use it yet (if you want a stable language/documentation) the language will be there if you want to check it in a few years.
        skhameneh 3mo ago
        Approximately 5 years ago
    - rapind 3mo ago
      I have definitely witnessed very specific cultures around languages I really like that I generally just don't vibe with. The author creates something brilliant, but there's a cadre of early adopters that shape a political and somewhat egotistical community that rubs me wrong. Once I spot them, I don't engage with the community. And it's not even that I disagree with the politics they espouse... I'm usually on the same page, but it's just kind of exhausting and a little over the top. I'm old-ish though and grew up apolitical, so I'm sure it's just a me problem.
- Crisco 3mo ago
  I’ve worked with people who I appreciate for their unapologetic willingness to be who they are. I might not agree with their opinions and think they’re a little extreme, but I’m glad people like them exist and enjoy seeing what they devote their time to. Based on the rest of Mitchell’s response, I think something like that is what is appreciated about Zig. I don’t use Zig, and frequently use Rust, but I’ve never really interacted with the core development team for either. I don’t think it’s necessary to care about whatever culture is driving development once it has sufficient velocity. The Rust I use today is more than enough for my needs. Maybe if I were more involved in open source I would better understand why culture matters, but unfortunately I’m mostly a consumer of it, not a producer.
- bri3d 3mo ago
  This is weird to me too, especially to say in the present tense in 2026. I think I get the point about "Rust culture" (although it's too vague to agree or disagree with, probably on purpose). But in 2026, Rust is fully a commodity language, and especially to compare it to Zig in this angle is bizarre. Even turning my stereotypes to 11 and thinking back to when I worked with a team developing Rust professionally in 2021, I'd say we got mostly ended up hiring "proglang enthusiasts" and not "Rust people." In terms of "cultural dilution" alone Zig is orders of magnitude more culty than Rust because that many fewer people use it.
- mountainriver 3mo ago
  I feel this way about most Hashi tools, they just seem massively overrated to me. Ghostty is fine I guess, I find it to be way buggier than iterm with a fraction of the features. Zig is fine, has some cool stuff, the community seems roughly the same as the rust, with again just way less features. The rest of the hashi tools are fine, I don’t really use any of them anymore. Vault was a big deal at some point I guess
  - slekker 3mo ago
    That's so dismissive, the HashiCorp products were a game changer in a world that had very little, Vault and Terraform are super widely used
    - LtWorf 3mo ago
      Ah yeah… it was so fun when vault wouldn't let me store a 4096bit private key because it was too long, so I had to use 2048bit one instead. Peak software engineering right there.
      - mountainriver 3mo ago
        did you look cool using it though?
  - jeffyaw 3mo ago
    i was an early vagrant user, a long time tf user, and 3 year nomad/consul user. but have moved on. cf now for aws & gcloud cli in scripts for gcp. and eks/gke instead of nomad.
  - firesteelrain 3mo ago
    Vault can seem niche however it’s used a lot in high assurance environments given it is easily integrated with Thales HSMs and has FIPS compliance
    - konart 3mo ago
      >niche Literally all companies I've worked for a know about use Vault for storing secrets to be used during deployment. It would be interesting to learn that this is different elsewhere.
- fukaiall 3mo ago
  Well you only talked with one single person and judge that the Zig community culture sucks? I’ve seen so many dogmatic views of those Rust apostles here on HN and Linked who think Rust is the only valuable language and all the others - Python, Go, C++ (of course) - are rubbish. I am so fed up with those snobbish views of a few Rust lovers and as much as I love the language I want to avoid those ignorant fucks.
  - latexr 3mo ago
    > Well you only talked with one single person and judge that the Zig community culture sucks? In fairness, Loris Cro is “VP of Community at Zig Software Foundation” so if there’s someone to judge the community by, Loris has more weight than just about anyone (perhaps excluding Andrew Kelly). Note I am not agreeing with your parent post, what I have seen from Loris and Andrew makes me interested in trying Zig.
- Ygg2 3mo ago
  > I remember watching HN and seeing every time there was something Rust related trending, there was ALWAYS a post made shortly after trying to hype Zig The Zig Evangelism Task Force has supplanted Rust as the premier hypebeast. And they'll be supplanted by the NEXT BIG THING.
- khuey 3mo ago
  > Back then I found the Rust community had interest and respect for Zig, so the discourse was very much one sided. In hindsight (and at risk of starting a flame war), it's easier to be magnanimous when you are winning/have won.
  - danudey 3mo ago
    Is it a competition? I wonder if the Zig people feel as though it is, because I doubt the Rust people do. Rust's big tentpole is "no memory management bugs, everything must be provably safe", whereas Zig is very proud of "no memory management, you have full control but you have to exercise it". I don't feel as though these are competing for the same audience or mindshare. I've used Zig a big (while trying to contribute to ghostty, at least), and it's an interesting language that I like the aesthetics of but I don't want to use. I use Rust for things because it's so specific about what it wants from you and won't let you go off-script, and frankly I find that very beneficial for myself as someone coming from Python, Javascript, PHP, etc. where you just let things fall out of scope and it's not your problem anymore (usually).
    - busterarm 3mo ago
      > I use Rust for things because it's so specific about what it wants from you and won't let you go off-script, and frankly I find that very beneficial for myself as someone coming from Python, Javascript, PHP, etc. where you just let things fall out of scope and it's not your problem anymore (usually). I share your complaints about the tools you came to Rust from, but the philosophy of not letting you go off script is great until it doesn't work for you. A lot of the reason some of us use the more flexible languages is because we've been in situations where a language and its ecosystem either won't let you do something outright or not without significant pain. Often when everything is on fire and your customers are cancelling contracts. You can't afford to wait for the core team or community to come in and save you in these situations. Having access to work around your problems is also the source of a lot of the pain you're talking about, but at least you get to stay in business to solve that problem tomorrow. To a very large degree, a lot of the Rust evangelists that I encounter in the wild are either hobbyists, academics or paid open source contributors at large companies. Most of the discussions I've seen wrt Rust at companies with actual deliverables stop at "Rust? Absolutely not.". Except for a very narrow set of systems where you want the kind of guarantees that Rust provides as a primary feature. For more general situations, the tradeoffs often aren't worth it.
- insanitybit 3mo ago
  I write rust and barely interact with the community. I used to. I spoke at the first rustconf, even. I don't really care to engage with the rust community anymore (I cut myself off entirely from most online communities tbh). I might stay away from a particularly toxic community or one with wildly different values, but I don't really get why you wouldn't write Rust just because of how some people post about it. Odd tbh. I find the whole thing about "oh the rust zealots" hand wringing stuff so silly, really.
  - juudjjsa 3mo ago
    [flagged]
    - seanhunter 3mo ago
      Please stop spamming the same comment in multiple subthreads. Also it’s pretty clear you are applfanboysbgone and have created an alt account for this knowing what you are doing is against guidelines and are doing it anyway.
- bagxrvxpepzn 3mo ago
  [dead]
- reinitctxoffset 3mo ago
  I think you'll find that out of all the pairwise combinations of language communities, there's one that stands out as having beef with a bunch of other ones. And that's not true of e.g. Haskell and OCaml (or to nothing like the same degree), so it's not just about competition for mindshare, it's about an approach to competition for mindshare. The C++ community and the Zig community seem to get along fine, so it not about looking up at the entrenched thing or down at the new thing, many orders of magnitude there and no drama. Python, R, and Julia folks all seem to get along. On the frontend there are a zillion things that compile to JS and even in the big camp the frameworks are split 9 ways, you get a little heat here and there over Vercel throwing big bucks or something but it's rare, generally the Svelte people and the Astro people seem to not mind when the other one front pages or whatever. Rust is at war with the world. Maybe it can even win but it's a weird road to walk by choice.
- throwaway613746 3mo ago
  [dead]
- spacechild1 3mo ago
  > I remember watching HN and seeing every time there was something Rust related trending, there was ALWAYS a post made shortly after trying to hype Zig and this went on for like 4 years. You just got a tiny taste of what Rust enthusiasts have been doing to every C++ related submission here on HN for years.
  - applfanboysbgon 3mo ago
    Seriously. Yesterday there was a thread about a use-after-free bug in OpenBSD and despite BSD predating Rust by decades there were still people chiding the project for not using Rust (as though Rust would even protect you from all memory errors in a kernel project where you'd inevitably need to write unsafe Rust anyways!). Rust might be a fine language but it has the most toxic evangelist culture, bar none.
    - tstack 3mo ago
      > there were still people chiding the project for not using Rust Please provide a link to this comment. Someone asked an honest question and got reasonable responses that were informative. At no point did anyone chide the project for not using Rust. > Rust might be a fine language but it has the most toxic evangelist culture, bar none. Nah, people complaining about the supposed toxic community are noisier than the supposed toxic community.
      - juudjjsa 3mo ago
        [flagged]
    - throwaway27448 3mo ago
      You have an awful low bar for what is considered chiding, damn Then again, your very username implies an indulgence in viewing technology through the lens of fandoms which is... weird
      - busterarm 3mo ago
- kjs3 3mo ago
  I remember watching HN and seeing every time there was something Rust related trending, there was ALWAYS a post made shortly after trying to hype Zig and this went on for like 4 years. Oh, please...if you haven't noticed the carpet bombing of rust advocacy on HN for more than 4 years and still in progress, you're deliberately not paying attention.
- voidhorse 3mo ago
  Kind of tangential to the man Rust v. Zig culture debate but: > I tried to get into Zig even chatted with Loris Cro when he was streaming. I was looking to explore what my Rust project could look like in Zig but there were features simply missing that I couldn't do without. The entire interaction was mostly about how bad Rust is and how I could just do something different in Zig (completely misunderstanding my ask, with little interest to explore my actual requirements). Kind of reeks of unreasonable expectations to me. I don't think one should expect language designers to redesign a language or introduce new features that would likely be poor fits with the overall existing language philosophy (the design and usage philosophies behind Rust and Zig are practically opposite poles). Language stewards have a responsibility to everyone in their existing user base and they have a responsibility to evolve the language in a ways that's consistent with the expectations they already established (if they want to keep their users that is). Expecting the designers to rework the language to bolt on features from some other language just for your project is kind of absurd. I think Loris's supposed response is actually correct here and probably the best response he could give, without knowing more about precisely what the requests were, how willing you were to contribute work yourself, etc.
- giancarlostoro 3mo ago
  It feels like Zig is trying to be more like C, and Rust is trying to fill a C++ slot. I wish someone would have made something in between, or that the industry would have adopted D more, it certainly didn't help that their compiler was proprietary for so long, and then they rewrote their STD lib. D to me is one language I love fundamentally, but the ecosystem is nowhere near where it could be.
  - flohofwoe 3mo ago
    Meh... I dabbled a bit with D in context of the sokol-d language bindings, and IMHO it's an even bigger kitchen sink than C++.
- portly 3mo ago
  > This is just so weird to me, because I would say the same about Zig. I think you missed his point. He's arguing against homogeneity of (cyber) culture. For example, programming languages that promise to do everything. Rust fanatics indeed can be a bit like that. Every time I see a thread here about someone building something in Zig, they storm in and start arguing 'why not rust!?'. The fact that you don't like the zig community is healthy and not weird. Don't worry about it. You don't have to like everything and you can disagree on taste.
- Anonyneko 3mo ago
  >about how bad X is and how I could just do something different in Y That's just engineering communities in a nutshell...
- wmedrano 3mo ago
  This is not surprising and perhaps one of the things I respect about it. Zig is pretty minimalist and I would prefer denying my pet features over becoming design by committee. I'm a bit curious, what features could you not do without?
bel8 3mo ago
Related from 13h ago: "My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite" by Zig's author Andrew Kelley https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48843352 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48843352
- dom96 3mo ago
  And for those interested in Mitchell's take on it: https://x.com/mitchellh/status/2075261972061594106?s=20 https://x.com/mitchellh/status/2075261972061594106?s=20. TL;DR: No comment.
  - Gobd 3mo ago
    That's the only right take, no need to make a comment on someone else expressing their opinion
  - throwaway902984 3mo ago
    https://nitter.net/mitchellh/status/2075261972061594106?s=20 https://nitter.net/mitchellh/status/2075261972061594106?s=20
Jtsummers 3mo ago
> I’ve always believed there should be way more forks, both personal and maintained ones. There aren't more forks because once you fork something you take on the burden of synchronization, or you forfeit the benefit of future upstream work. To focus on Ghostty, Mitchell has taken on the effort of maintaining cross-platform support. If I want one specific feature (or even a bunch of features) and create a custom fork, but then GTK changes, now I have to support that change myself (assuming it is relevant to me or my community of users), or figure out a way to integrate Mitchell's changes into my fork, or I risk losing my customizations by having to rollback to baseline if the differences between my fork and baseline are too great. If the system is well-engineered (the work on libghostty helps here) then you can keep that common core without forking, and fork just things on the periphery of the system. But well-engineered is not common.
- tecoholic 3mo ago
  By making “upstreaming” the core of OS contribution, we have also failed to build tooling around downstream synchronisation. There are dedicated browser forks (a very highly complex software) that are maintained by a few volunteers. So maintaining 1 or 2 additional features depending on personal choices (or a specific company’s) shouldn’t be that hard. If we have a world where that’s normal, we will have a bigger talent pool in core tech, cloud vendors would have a hard time selling hosted solutions of open source software..etc., I think we left a good chunk of net positive impact on the table by what Mitchell mentions as the “open source project as a product” approach.
- NetMageSCW 3mo ago
  Perhaps this is one place AI could prove very helpful - automating the synchronization of forks with their parents while keeping the changes that constitute the actual fork. Or perhaps something other than forking is needed that is more diff based so you have a view of the source overlaid with the fork and the parts unchanged flow through. At least until something like Bun’s change from Zig to Rust blows your fork up completely.
  - Cilvic 3mo ago
    I've been thinking about this as well. How can people "AI federate" their forks, without relying on a single maintainer. Mostly because in the pi.dev ecosystem there are so many similar extensions and usually everyone wants their own little special something, but then everyone could benefit from maintenance updates/bug fixes.
waterTanuki 3mo ago
> The philosophy behind [Rust] and the language itself is really good. I just don’t want to use it. That's all that needed to be said. He only makes himself and the rest of the Zig "community" look as petty as some of the worst Rust people with the surrounding remarks. Why does anyone need to care what a few randoms think of a language? Either it gets used or it doesn't.
- fwip 3mo ago
  As a guy who writes a famous Zig project, he probably gets a lot of young, eager Rust advocates trying to sell him on it. If it's his primary experience with the community, no wonder he's fed up.
- turtlebits 3mo ago
  Petty? It's just a tool, people have opinions, rational or not. The stupid thing is getting up in arms because someone said something you don't like.
tecoholic 3mo ago
Man, these are the kinds of things that I am so happy to read. People who think and care deeply about what they do, take pragmatic decisions that appears right to them and explain why they do things the way they do. Very motivating. Literally moved me from the couch to the work desk .
- nesarkvechnep 3mo ago
  Unfortunately, it made me even more sad because the project I'm working on now is complete trash. Every line outdoes the previous in the dumbest thing possible. Four years at the company and not a single greenfield project for me, only well established piles of... you get the idea.
- veqq 3mo ago
  There are many more! https://alexalejandre.com/interviews/ https://alexalejandre.com/interviews/
sgarland 3mo ago
This is the only statement I disagree with: > PowerShell gets a lot right with structured data. CLI programs should operate on text. If you want to parse and format it, do so, but the default output mode should be plain text, so that I can pipe it into grep or awk without a second thought. I am continuously irritated that the AWS CLI defaults to outputting in JSON. No one (I hope…) is using that tool in programs; that’s what boto3 and its ilk are for. But if humans are reading it, why default to something that they’re almost certainly going to be piping into jq if only for the formatting help?
- tredre3 3mo ago
  Powershell commands automatically format the data for you, you can pipe it to grep just fine (I do it all the time). It's just that you can also access it in a structured way if you need to. It's the best of both worlds. Linux tools that are starting to output raw JSON by default are indeed a nuisance, but how else can you achieve structured output if no standard shell supports it? It's a chicken and egg problem.
  - em-bee 3mo ago
    and new shells are developing features to handle structured data like json: here is an elvish shell command that converts a freetube playlist from json into a list of urls grouped by author: for i (cat 'freetube-playlist-favorites.db' | from-json)["videos"] { mkdir -p $i['author'] print http://youtu.be/$i['videoId'] >> $i['author']/get } here is one to get a list of devices connected to my zerotier network curl -s -H "Authorization: token <redacted>" "https://api.zerotier.com/api/v1/network/<redacted>/member" | all (from-json) | order &key={|d| put $d[name]} | each { |device| var t = (printf "%.0f" (/ $device[lastSeen] 1000)) if (> 20000000 (- (date '+%s') $t)) { print (date -R --date='@'$t) $device[config][ipAssignments] $device[name] "\n" } } those are not scripts saved in a file. i run these directly on the commandline. ignore the elvish syntax, focus on the ease of accessing values from the json data. those are just two examples, though i recently discovered an ls replacement that optionally outputs json, that will be interesting to use.
arikrahman 3mo ago
Looking forward to Andrew Kelley interview's sequel and Jeaye's reaction to this.
greatony 3mo ago
Reading this and Bun's Rust transition blog side by side just gives me a lot fun. I'm a big fan of Rust, and as well as Ghostty. Picking proper programming language is mostly about the product you are making and the problem you are solving. My choice for my robot control system is Rust because I want zero-cost abstraction, no GC jitter, memory safety and avoid race conditions. Then I moved my focus to AI agents and web applications, I pick TypeScript to take advantage of the whole ecosystem and no need to sync between backend and frontend codes. I do not think products like Ghostty could benefit from Rust's memory safety feature a lot, but it do requires more attention to fight against the lifetime checker
jdw64 3mo ago
Rust must be a big deal. Every post about programming languages seems to mention Rust. Even C++ articles bring up Rust, and Zig articles bring up Rust. I think it's because Rust has solved some really impressive problems. But at the same time, when I read interviews where people are so intensely conscious of Rust, I can't help feeling that they've come to see Rust as having solved the problems inherent in their own languages better than they did.
- zdkaster 3mo ago
  I'm neutral. But sadly, this seems to be always the case when the unorthodox rising star emerges in the society.
  - jdw64 3mo ago
    [dead]
- 9rx 3mo ago
  Do you see any other examples of where technical excellence is attention grabbing? From my vantage point, when something does a great job at solving a problem better than everything else nobody spends their days trying to read about it, everyone quietly starts using it. It is undeniable that Rust gets mentioned a lot because any mention of Rust brings the clicks. It is a big deal in that sense. But something being used to compel readers into reading content suggests an emotional longing that isn't being satisfied by the technical reality.
  - jdw64 3mo ago
    What is that emotional longing, exactly? I don't really know. First, to be honest about my own feelings toward Rust: as you know, Rust's traits feel like a mix of Haskell's typeclasses and OOP, and that mashup of multiple languages just didn't click with me. I'm not a fan of solving compiler puzzles either. Especially when I've used AI to generate Rust code, it produced a lot of bad code relying heavily on clone, so it's not a language I'm particularly fond of. In that sense, I do understand part of what you're saying. I suppose this is exactly the "emotional longing that isn't being satisfied by the technical reality" you mentioned. So then why does the community keep holding Rust up as this symbol? That's the hard part. Rust's promise is solving undefined behavior. But UB has already been largely solved by GC languages too. So what is it about Rust that pulls people in? Is it because it replaces C and C++, the oldest legacy in programming? Or is it because it's hard for a new superstar to emerge within the legacy that C and C++ created, so people are drawn to Rust as a fresh language? I really don't know. It's a tough question.
mowens3 3mo ago
I accidentally spent last week living in libghostty without knowing it. I was using rootshell, an iOS terminal app built on it. It fixed all my Claude Code scrolling and session problems on iPad. It's the first tmux experience that's felt like a native shell to me. Totally awesome.
- swah 3mo ago
  How good is that setup to interact with agents on the go?
  - mowens3 3mo ago
    [dead]
hudiahs 3mo ago
[flagged]
hudiahs 3mo ago
[flagged]
hudiahs 3mo ago
[flagged]
hudiahs 3mo ago
[flagged]
hudiahs 3mo ago
[flagged]
rustystump 3mo ago
Woof. Back before rust was a thing in uni all the c++ guys shat on the newbies using java and not a real language. The entire rust vs c++\c vs zig vs odin etc is so stupid. Like it is the same culture that has always been there in elitist systems language people. Meanwhile the vast majority of programmers are happily clacking away in python or js or elm or lua or whatever is getting the job done.
geraneum 3mo ago
It's so sad that Rust vs Zig has been dragged into the AI psychosis vs anti AI narratives. I feel people are taking sides or picking and choosing now based on their allegiance and religious values. What good comes out of this?
- marand23 3mo ago
  It's just standard nerd drama. Nothing good comes of it but it doesn't matter at all either. Just shake your head and move on with your life.
  - geraneum 3mo ago
    > It's just standard nerd drama. The elephant in the room are the trillion $ companies having a horse in this race.
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
guesswho_ 3mo ago
[dead]
brownpoints 3mo ago
I don’t like the zig culture. There’s no better way to put it.
- 27183 3mo ago
  Does it really matter? I don't like much of the overbearing "rust culture" but I love the language and many libraries and projects are exceptionally high quality. I also like zig, people are building cool things with it. I have far less experience with it than rust but it looks interesting. I don't really get all the culture stuff, it seems like misspent energy.
dbdr 3mo ago
> I don’t like the Rust culture. There’s no better way to put it. Every time I’ve interacted with them or hear how they talk about Rust, I just don’t like it. I wonder if it's not that different people have entirely different experiences: If you are outside the rust community, you'll mostly interact in the context of language flame wars, "why don't you just rewrite it in rust", etc. That is, you interact with the (small) part of the rust community that is most likely to want to dismiss other languages and want to brag. I consider myself in the rust community, on reddit, the rust forum, etc, and I find it extremely well-meaning, inclusive, supportive of beginners, thoughtful, and generally a very pleasant bunch.
- z0ltan 3mo ago
  [dead]
- pdpi 3mo ago
  Zealots are a problem in every community, sadly. Rust zealots are in the unfortunate position of having the tiniest bit of objective truth on their side — all else being equal, most C software would indeed benefit from being written in Rust instead. The zealots just don’t understand (or acknowledge) how “all else being equal” does all the heavy lifting. As somebody who’s fascinated by programming languages in general, I’m quite keen on Zig. I prefer Rust, and disagree with a bunch of things Zig does, but admire the language for trying.
  - amiga386 3mo ago
    > all else being equal, most C software would indeed benefit from being written in Rust instead I don't even think this is true. You can certainly say "the security of computer systems would be a little bit better if most software was written in memory safe languages" (even more so if you went a bit further and said "with automatic memory management"). However, a lot of software exists and is useful, and the only reason it exists is because the author(s) found a way they liked to express that software. So, for example, there are millions of companies out there, especially small ones, running all their finances on Excel. Not even accounting software. Excel. I am totally OK with this. I do not need all these companies to rewrite their Excel workflows into frontend applications backed by a relational database, even though that would be "better" in a lot of ways (more robust, easier to backup, easier to bring someone else onto...). Those little business owners understand Excel and build models and count numbers and they're happy with that. If some kind of edict compelled them to use something "proper" instead, they might not even go into business, and the world would lose whatever it is their business does. The same thing goes for software and languages. Each language, whether it's F#, Haskell, Common Lisp, PHP, ... brings with it its own kinds of expressiveness and usefulness, and ecosystems of programmers and libraries/modules form around it. Some languages are a better "fit", sometimes for the problem domain, sometimes for the programmer's mind, sometimes for community building. It's difficult to compare any two languages because of this, and if you were to say "language X should not exist, all software written in X should've been written in language Y", you have to accept in your thought experiment that were that the case, their is likely a huge amount of software which would not exist just out of the people who made it not being happy about language Y and, if it were the only choice, would choose not to create the software they created in language X at all.
xyzsparetimexyz 3mo ago
What does ghostty do better than say alacritty?
- gen2brain 3mo ago
  Does alacritty have, and/or work on a library that is reusable in other projects? If not, there is that to start.
  - xyzsparetimexyz 3mo ago
    Why would I need that
    - LtWorf 3mo ago
      To embed it into an IDE?
      - trashface 3mo ago
        Why would I need that
        LtWorf 3mo ago
        Test your software? Test your software with a debugger? Check a manpage?
- simgt 3mo ago
  ghostty has tabs and splits for instance, alacritty is deliberately minimalistic
TheChaplain 3mo ago
I've tried to learn rust of the longest time but failed, it's not the community that is the problem but the language itself. It is far from aesthetically pleasing, a child of perl and c++ meta template programming that inherited the worst traits of both. Go and Python are my current preference, and C being an old soul mate.
- worrycue 3mo ago
  > C being an old soul mate. Maybe try Odin. Based on what I have read, it’s basically C capability-wise with better ergonomics - a simple language; no objects and limited compile time shenanigans.
  - sethops1 3mo ago
    I'd like to try out Odin and also Inko, which looks like Rust and Go had a baby. https://inko-lang.org https://inko-lang.org
- Zambyte 3mo ago
  I have often described Zig to people as a middle ground between C and Go. It sounds like you might really enjoy it.
Esophagus4 3mo ago
> How can we push terminals harder? > I don’t support pushing terminals to the extreme… Reminds me of what Warp has become these days
hncharlatans 3mo ago
[flagged]
cassepipe 3mo ago
> I want to make the terminal a special place for applications. The PTY’s in-band signalling (an unstructured byte stream with escape sequences) is a big problem. The Nushell ecosystem tries to fix it with another layer, but we need a fundamental improvement. Many people dislike the Microsoft ecosystem, but PowerShell gets a lot right with structured data. I wish they would say more. The little nushell I used was a real pleasure to work with but they seem to imply there are limitations to the approach (one more layer ?). It seems the model to emulate is powershell but what does powershell do better than nushell ? I though it was essentially the same approach
- Analemma_ 3mo ago
  Structured data as the communication medium between shell applications is so obviously a good thing, once you've used it, the Unix way of chopping up text with flags and formatting utilities seems barbaric. PowerShell got it half-right but blundered by talking in binary blobs of .NET objects instead of structured text; it was an understandable decision given how Microsoft worked at the time, but held it back from greatness. But it's not clear how to get from here to there; Nushell doesn't seem to be catching on. I sometimes fantasize about adding two more standard streams, stdstructin and stdstructout, to go with stdin/stdout/stderr, which by informal or formal standard would write JSON (or whatever). Then coreutils and other programs could adopt them gradually and fall back to stdin/stdout whenever encountering a program not using them, and we could have gradual migration while keeping backward compatibility.
mintflow 3mo ago
> Back to Zig, Zig has a really polarizing specific stance on what it does from technology, to community management and funding to PR, blog posts and how they talk. I don’t agree with all of it but I so respect that they are unapologetically weird. So I continue to support them financially and use their technology because I support people trying to be their own person. I read the full articles and always like what Mitchell trying to express, the above is an example
- Aurornis 3mo ago
  That's the most eloquently diplomatic way to address it. He really does have a way with words. At the same time, it makes me a little sad that when pressed, the best thing that could be said about Zig is that it's unapologetically weird right after a sentence about not agreeing with how they manage the project. I had high hopes for Zig, but the current situation feels like they're actively moving toward being a niche language and away from being something that I could make a case for in a business context.
  - veqq 3mo ago
    > when pressed, the best thing that could be said about Zig is What do you mean? We didn't really discuss technical aspects etc. and he said he does like how they manage the project.
    - franktankbank 3mo ago
      The person you are replying to is on every Zig thread bashing it.
      - Aurornis 3mo ago
        You must have me mistaken for someone else because that's not true on multiple levels.
    - Aurornis 3mo ago
      > he said he does like how they manage the project. That's the diplomatic part. He sidesteps the problems by saying that he doesn't agree with all of it (which leaves it ambiguous) but then pivots to praising the way they're unapologetic and weird. > I don’t agree with all of it but I so respect that they are unapologetically weird.

405 points by veqq 3mo ago

> I don’t like the Rust culture. There’s no better way to put it. This is just so weird to me, because I would say the same about Zig. I tried to get into Zig even chatted with Loris Cro when he was streaming. I was looking to explore what my Rust project could look like in Zig but there were features simply missing that I couldn't do without. The entire interaction was mostly about how bad Rust is and how I could just do something different in Zig (completely misunderstanding my ask, with little interest to explore my actual requirements). I remember watching HN and seeing every time there was something Rust related trending, there was ALWAYS a post made shortly after trying to hype Zig and this went on for like 4 years. I'm not a Rust contributor and I don't care for some of the challenges that come with Rust, but I love what it accomplished and I find it does it very well. Back then I found the Rust community had interest and respect for Zig, so the discourse was very much one sided.

nixpulvis 3mo ago
Culture wars are sadly one of the biggest inhibitors of progress throughout all of technology.
- ori_b 3mo ago
  Why does liking something different from you imply there's a war?
  - hoppp 3mo ago
    There is often a neo-tribalistic mentality. "My tribe is better than your tribe" Some people thrive inside this mentality, whole others don't go near it. Not everyone is thinking like this but a lot of people do. So because of that it's a common heuristic to think of it as "war" because there are some people who do that gladly.
    - flohofwoe 3mo ago
      In computing this is almost a tradition (Commodore vs Atari vs PC, Windows vs UNIX vs MacOS). It hasn't exactly hindered progress, I'd rather call it healthy competition ;) Still though: Amiga 4 ever! :D
  - nixpulvis 3mo ago
    It doesn't and I never said anything about preferences directly. There are however culture wars, and they cause problems throughout the industry and discipline.
  - juudjjsa 3mo ago
    [flagged]
- ks2048 3mo ago
  It seems to hinge a lot on what is “culture”.
  - pstuart 3mo ago
    "my tribe"
- dbetteridge 3mo ago
  You could just have left off the last part of that :D > Culture wars are sadly one of the biggest inhibitors of progress
pron 3mo ago
> This is just so weird to me, because I would say the same about Zig. Then why is it weird if you're saying the same thing? Different programming languages appeal to programmers with different tastes, and so it makes sense that some programmers would be drawn to language X and dislike language Y, while others would be the opposite.
- nine_k 3mo ago
  Maybe it's even the other way around: different cultures and tastes give birth to different languages and community norms around them.
  - skhameneh 3mo ago
    This is a good take. I was interested in accomplishing my goals and had an interest in both Rust and Zig. Going in, Rust was already proven to meet my needs and I was exploring Zig. Everything being centered around anti-Rust and “better than Rust” without meeting my needs made it a non-starter, it got in the way of discussing the languages themselves.
    - garbagepatch 3mo ago
      When was this? I've only seen this "anti-rust" vibe in the past few weeks, guess triggered by the Bun rewrite. Zig people usually will tell you to use the right tool for the job over shilling the language or that you don't need to use it yet (if you want a stable language/documentation) the language will be there if you want to check it in a few years.
      - skhameneh 3mo ago
        Approximately 5 years ago
  - rapind 3mo ago
    I have definitely witnessed very specific cultures around languages I really like that I generally just don't vibe with. The author creates something brilliant, but there's a cadre of early adopters that shape a political and somewhat egotistical community that rubs me wrong. Once I spot them, I don't engage with the community. And it's not even that I disagree with the politics they espouse... I'm usually on the same page, but it's just kind of exhausting and a little over the top. I'm old-ish though and grew up apolitical, so I'm sure it's just a me problem.
Crisco 3mo ago
I’ve worked with people who I appreciate for their unapologetic willingness to be who they are. I might not agree with their opinions and think they’re a little extreme, but I’m glad people like them exist and enjoy seeing what they devote their time to. Based on the rest of Mitchell’s response, I think something like that is what is appreciated about Zig. I don’t use Zig, and frequently use Rust, but I’ve never really interacted with the core development team for either. I don’t think it’s necessary to care about whatever culture is driving development once it has sufficient velocity. The Rust I use today is more than enough for my needs. Maybe if I were more involved in open source I would better understand why culture matters, but unfortunately I’m mostly a consumer of it, not a producer.
bri3d 3mo ago
This is weird to me too, especially to say in the present tense in 2026. I think I get the point about "Rust culture" (although it's too vague to agree or disagree with, probably on purpose). But in 2026, Rust is fully a commodity language, and especially to compare it to Zig in this angle is bizarre. Even turning my stereotypes to 11 and thinking back to when I worked with a team developing Rust professionally in 2021, I'd say we got mostly ended up hiring "proglang enthusiasts" and not "Rust people." In terms of "cultural dilution" alone Zig is orders of magnitude more culty than Rust because that many fewer people use it.
mountainriver 3mo ago
I feel this way about most Hashi tools, they just seem massively overrated to me. Ghostty is fine I guess, I find it to be way buggier than iterm with a fraction of the features. Zig is fine, has some cool stuff, the community seems roughly the same as the rust, with again just way less features. The rest of the hashi tools are fine, I don’t really use any of them anymore. Vault was a big deal at some point I guess
- slekker 3mo ago
  That's so dismissive, the HashiCorp products were a game changer in a world that had very little, Vault and Terraform are super widely used
  - LtWorf 3mo ago
    Ah yeah… it was so fun when vault wouldn't let me store a 4096bit private key because it was too long, so I had to use 2048bit one instead. Peak software engineering right there.
    - mountainriver 3mo ago
      did you look cool using it though?
- jeffyaw 3mo ago
  i was an early vagrant user, a long time tf user, and 3 year nomad/consul user. but have moved on. cf now for aws & gcloud cli in scripts for gcp. and eks/gke instead of nomad.
- firesteelrain 3mo ago
  Vault can seem niche however it’s used a lot in high assurance environments given it is easily integrated with Thales HSMs and has FIPS compliance
  - konart 3mo ago
    >niche Literally all companies I've worked for a know about use Vault for storing secrets to be used during deployment. It would be interesting to learn that this is different elsewhere.
fukaiall 3mo ago
Well you only talked with one single person and judge that the Zig community culture sucks? I’ve seen so many dogmatic views of those Rust apostles here on HN and Linked who think Rust is the only valuable language and all the others - Python, Go, C++ (of course) - are rubbish. I am so fed up with those snobbish views of a few Rust lovers and as much as I love the language I want to avoid those ignorant fucks.
- latexr 3mo ago
  > Well you only talked with one single person and judge that the Zig community culture sucks? In fairness, Loris Cro is “VP of Community at Zig Software Foundation” so if there’s someone to judge the community by, Loris has more weight than just about anyone (perhaps excluding Andrew Kelly). Note I am not agreeing with your parent post, what I have seen from Loris and Andrew makes me interested in trying Zig.
Ygg2 3mo ago
> I remember watching HN and seeing every time there was something Rust related trending, there was ALWAYS a post made shortly after trying to hype Zig The Zig Evangelism Task Force has supplanted Rust as the premier hypebeast. And they'll be supplanted by the NEXT BIG THING.
khuey 3mo ago
> Back then I found the Rust community had interest and respect for Zig, so the discourse was very much one sided. In hindsight (and at risk of starting a flame war), it's easier to be magnanimous when you are winning/have won.
- danudey 3mo ago
  Is it a competition? I wonder if the Zig people feel as though it is, because I doubt the Rust people do. Rust's big tentpole is "no memory management bugs, everything must be provably safe", whereas Zig is very proud of "no memory management, you have full control but you have to exercise it". I don't feel as though these are competing for the same audience or mindshare. I've used Zig a big (while trying to contribute to ghostty, at least), and it's an interesting language that I like the aesthetics of but I don't want to use. I use Rust for things because it's so specific about what it wants from you and won't let you go off-script, and frankly I find that very beneficial for myself as someone coming from Python, Javascript, PHP, etc. where you just let things fall out of scope and it's not your problem anymore (usually).
  - busterarm 3mo ago
    > I use Rust for things because it's so specific about what it wants from you and won't let you go off-script, and frankly I find that very beneficial for myself as someone coming from Python, Javascript, PHP, etc. where you just let things fall out of scope and it's not your problem anymore (usually). I share your complaints about the tools you came to Rust from, but the philosophy of not letting you go off script is great until it doesn't work for you. A lot of the reason some of us use the more flexible languages is because we've been in situations where a language and its ecosystem either won't let you do something outright or not without significant pain. Often when everything is on fire and your customers are cancelling contracts. You can't afford to wait for the core team or community to come in and save you in these situations. Having access to work around your problems is also the source of a lot of the pain you're talking about, but at least you get to stay in business to solve that problem tomorrow. To a very large degree, a lot of the Rust evangelists that I encounter in the wild are either hobbyists, academics or paid open source contributors at large companies. Most of the discussions I've seen wrt Rust at companies with actual deliverables stop at "Rust? Absolutely not.". Except for a very narrow set of systems where you want the kind of guarantees that Rust provides as a primary feature. For more general situations, the tradeoffs often aren't worth it.
insanitybit 3mo ago
I write rust and barely interact with the community. I used to. I spoke at the first rustconf, even. I don't really care to engage with the rust community anymore (I cut myself off entirely from most online communities tbh). I might stay away from a particularly toxic community or one with wildly different values, but I don't really get why you wouldn't write Rust just because of how some people post about it. Odd tbh. I find the whole thing about "oh the rust zealots" hand wringing stuff so silly, really.
- juudjjsa 3mo ago
  [flagged]
  - seanhunter 3mo ago
    Please stop spamming the same comment in multiple subthreads. Also it’s pretty clear you are applfanboysbgone and have created an alt account for this knowing what you are doing is against guidelines and are doing it anyway.
bagxrvxpepzn 3mo ago
[dead]
reinitctxoffset 3mo ago
I think you'll find that out of all the pairwise combinations of language communities, there's one that stands out as having beef with a bunch of other ones. And that's not true of e.g. Haskell and OCaml (or to nothing like the same degree), so it's not just about competition for mindshare, it's about an approach to competition for mindshare. The C++ community and the Zig community seem to get along fine, so it not about looking up at the entrenched thing or down at the new thing, many orders of magnitude there and no drama. Python, R, and Julia folks all seem to get along. On the frontend there are a zillion things that compile to JS and even in the big camp the frameworks are split 9 ways, you get a little heat here and there over Vercel throwing big bucks or something but it's rare, generally the Svelte people and the Astro people seem to not mind when the other one front pages or whatever. Rust is at war with the world. Maybe it can even win but it's a weird road to walk by choice.
throwaway613746 3mo ago
[dead]
spacechild1 3mo ago
> I remember watching HN and seeing every time there was something Rust related trending, there was ALWAYS a post made shortly after trying to hype Zig and this went on for like 4 years. You just got a tiny taste of what Rust enthusiasts have been doing to every C++ related submission here on HN for years.
- applfanboysbgon 3mo ago
  Seriously. Yesterday there was a thread about a use-after-free bug in OpenBSD and despite BSD predating Rust by decades there were still people chiding the project for not using Rust (as though Rust would even protect you from all memory errors in a kernel project where you'd inevitably need to write unsafe Rust anyways!). Rust might be a fine language but it has the most toxic evangelist culture, bar none.
  - tstack 3mo ago
    > there were still people chiding the project for not using Rust Please provide a link to this comment. Someone asked an honest question and got reasonable responses that were informative. At no point did anyone chide the project for not using Rust. > Rust might be a fine language but it has the most toxic evangelist culture, bar none. Nah, people complaining about the supposed toxic community are noisier than the supposed toxic community.
    - juudjjsa 3mo ago
      [flagged]
  - throwaway27448 3mo ago
    You have an awful low bar for what is considered chiding, damn Then again, your very username implies an indulgence in viewing technology through the lens of fandoms which is... weird
    - busterarm 3mo ago
kjs3 3mo ago
I remember watching HN and seeing every time there was something Rust related trending, there was ALWAYS a post made shortly after trying to hype Zig and this went on for like 4 years. Oh, please...if you haven't noticed the carpet bombing of rust advocacy on HN for more than 4 years and still in progress, you're deliberately not paying attention.
voidhorse 3mo ago
Kind of tangential to the man Rust v. Zig culture debate but: > I tried to get into Zig even chatted with Loris Cro when he was streaming. I was looking to explore what my Rust project could look like in Zig but there were features simply missing that I couldn't do without. The entire interaction was mostly about how bad Rust is and how I could just do something different in Zig (completely misunderstanding my ask, with little interest to explore my actual requirements). Kind of reeks of unreasonable expectations to me. I don't think one should expect language designers to redesign a language or introduce new features that would likely be poor fits with the overall existing language philosophy (the design and usage philosophies behind Rust and Zig are practically opposite poles). Language stewards have a responsibility to everyone in their existing user base and they have a responsibility to evolve the language in a ways that's consistent with the expectations they already established (if they want to keep their users that is). Expecting the designers to rework the language to bolt on features from some other language just for your project is kind of absurd. I think Loris's supposed response is actually correct here and probably the best response he could give, without knowing more about precisely what the requests were, how willing you were to contribute work yourself, etc.
giancarlostoro 3mo ago
It feels like Zig is trying to be more like C, and Rust is trying to fill a C++ slot. I wish someone would have made something in between, or that the industry would have adopted D more, it certainly didn't help that their compiler was proprietary for so long, and then they rewrote their STD lib. D to me is one language I love fundamentally, but the ecosystem is nowhere near where it could be.
- flohofwoe 3mo ago
  Meh... I dabbled a bit with D in context of the sokol-d language bindings, and IMHO it's an even bigger kitchen sink than C++.
portly 3mo ago
> This is just so weird to me, because I would say the same about Zig. I think you missed his point. He's arguing against homogeneity of (cyber) culture. For example, programming languages that promise to do everything. Rust fanatics indeed can be a bit like that. Every time I see a thread here about someone building something in Zig, they storm in and start arguing 'why not rust!?'. The fact that you don't like the zig community is healthy and not weird. Don't worry about it. You don't have to like everything and you can disagree on taste.
Anonyneko 3mo ago
>about how bad X is and how I could just do something different in Y That's just engineering communities in a nutshell...
wmedrano 3mo ago
This is not surprising and perhaps one of the things I respect about it. Zig is pretty minimalist and I would prefer denying my pet features over becoming design by committee. I'm a bit curious, what features could you not do without?

bel8 3mo ago

Related from 13h ago: "My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite" by Zig's author Andrew Kelley https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48843352 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48843352

dom96 3mo ago
And for those interested in Mitchell's take on it: https://x.com/mitchellh/status/2075261972061594106?s=20 https://x.com/mitchellh/status/2075261972061594106?s=20. TL;DR: No comment.
- Gobd 3mo ago
  That's the only right take, no need to make a comment on someone else expressing their opinion
- throwaway902984 3mo ago
  https://nitter.net/mitchellh/status/2075261972061594106?s=20 https://nitter.net/mitchellh/status/2075261972061594106?s=20

Jtsummers 3mo ago

> I’ve always believed there should be way more forks, both personal and maintained ones. There aren't more forks because once you fork something you take on the burden of synchronization, or you forfeit the benefit of future upstream work. To focus on Ghostty, Mitchell has taken on the effort of maintaining cross-platform support. If I want one specific feature (or even a bunch of features) and create a custom fork, but then GTK changes, now I have to support that change myself (assuming it is relevant to me or my community of users), or figure out a way to integrate Mitchell's changes into my fork, or I risk losing my customizations by having to rollback to baseline if the differences between my fork and baseline are too great. If the system is well-engineered (the work on libghostty helps here) then you can keep that common core without forking, and fork just things on the periphery of the system. But well-engineered is not common.

tecoholic 3mo ago
By making “upstreaming” the core of OS contribution, we have also failed to build tooling around downstream synchronisation. There are dedicated browser forks (a very highly complex software) that are maintained by a few volunteers. So maintaining 1 or 2 additional features depending on personal choices (or a specific company’s) shouldn’t be that hard. If we have a world where that’s normal, we will have a bigger talent pool in core tech, cloud vendors would have a hard time selling hosted solutions of open source software..etc., I think we left a good chunk of net positive impact on the table by what Mitchell mentions as the “open source project as a product” approach.
NetMageSCW 3mo ago
Perhaps this is one place AI could prove very helpful - automating the synchronization of forks with their parents while keeping the changes that constitute the actual fork. Or perhaps something other than forking is needed that is more diff based so you have a view of the source overlaid with the fork and the parts unchanged flow through. At least until something like Bun’s change from Zig to Rust blows your fork up completely.
- Cilvic 3mo ago
  I've been thinking about this as well. How can people "AI federate" their forks, without relying on a single maintainer. Mostly because in the pi.dev ecosystem there are so many similar extensions and usually everyone wants their own little special something, but then everyone could benefit from maintenance updates/bug fixes.

waterTanuki 3mo ago

> The philosophy behind [Rust] and the language itself is really good. I just don’t want to use it. That's all that needed to be said. He only makes himself and the rest of the Zig "community" look as petty as some of the worst Rust people with the surrounding remarks. Why does anyone need to care what a few randoms think of a language? Either it gets used or it doesn't.

fwip 3mo ago
As a guy who writes a famous Zig project, he probably gets a lot of young, eager Rust advocates trying to sell him on it. If it's his primary experience with the community, no wonder he's fed up.
turtlebits 3mo ago
Petty? It's just a tool, people have opinions, rational or not. The stupid thing is getting up in arms because someone said something you don't like.

tecoholic 3mo ago

Man, these are the kinds of things that I am so happy to read. People who think and care deeply about what they do, take pragmatic decisions that appears right to them and explain why they do things the way they do. Very motivating. Literally moved me from the couch to the work desk .

nesarkvechnep 3mo ago
Unfortunately, it made me even more sad because the project I'm working on now is complete trash. Every line outdoes the previous in the dumbest thing possible. Four years at the company and not a single greenfield project for me, only well established piles of... you get the idea.
veqq 3mo ago
There are many more! https://alexalejandre.com/interviews/ https://alexalejandre.com/interviews/

sgarland 3mo ago

This is the only statement I disagree with: > PowerShell gets a lot right with structured data. CLI programs should operate on text. If you want to parse and format it, do so, but the default output mode should be plain text, so that I can pipe it into grep or awk without a second thought. I am continuously irritated that the AWS CLI defaults to outputting in JSON. No one (I hope…) is using that tool in programs; that’s what boto3 and its ilk are for. But if humans are reading it, why default to something that they’re almost certainly going to be piping into jq if only for the formatting help?

tredre3 3mo ago
Powershell commands automatically format the data for you, you can pipe it to grep just fine (I do it all the time). It's just that you can also access it in a structured way if you need to. It's the best of both worlds. Linux tools that are starting to output raw JSON by default are indeed a nuisance, but how else can you achieve structured output if no standard shell supports it? It's a chicken and egg problem.
- em-bee 3mo ago
  and new shells are developing features to handle structured data like json: here is an elvish shell command that converts a freetube playlist from json into a list of urls grouped by author: for i (cat 'freetube-playlist-favorites.db' | from-json)["videos"] { mkdir -p $i['author'] print http://youtu.be/$i['videoId'] >> $i['author']/get } here is one to get a list of devices connected to my zerotier network curl -s -H "Authorization: token <redacted>" "https://api.zerotier.com/api/v1/network/<redacted>/member" | all (from-json) | order &key={|d| put $d[name]} | each { |device| var t = (printf "%.0f" (/ $device[lastSeen] 1000)) if (> 20000000 (- (date '+%s') $t)) { print (date -R --date='@'$t) $device[config][ipAssignments] $device[name] "\n" } } those are not scripts saved in a file. i run these directly on the commandline. ignore the elvish syntax, focus on the ease of accessing values from the json data. those are just two examples, though i recently discovered an ls replacement that optionally outputs json, that will be interesting to use.

arikrahman 3mo ago

Looking forward to Andrew Kelley interview's sequel and Jeaye's reaction to this.

greatony 3mo ago

Reading this and Bun's Rust transition blog side by side just gives me a lot fun. I'm a big fan of Rust, and as well as Ghostty. Picking proper programming language is mostly about the product you are making and the problem you are solving. My choice for my robot control system is Rust because I want zero-cost abstraction, no GC jitter, memory safety and avoid race conditions. Then I moved my focus to AI agents and web applications, I pick TypeScript to take advantage of the whole ecosystem and no need to sync between backend and frontend codes. I do not think products like Ghostty could benefit from Rust's memory safety feature a lot, but it do requires more attention to fight against the lifetime checker

jdw64 3mo ago

Rust must be a big deal. Every post about programming languages seems to mention Rust. Even C++ articles bring up Rust, and Zig articles bring up Rust. I think it's because Rust has solved some really impressive problems. But at the same time, when I read interviews where people are so intensely conscious of Rust, I can't help feeling that they've come to see Rust as having solved the problems inherent in their own languages better than they did.

zdkaster 3mo ago
I'm neutral. But sadly, this seems to be always the case when the unorthodox rising star emerges in the society.
- jdw64 3mo ago
  [dead]
9rx 3mo ago
Do you see any other examples of where technical excellence is attention grabbing? From my vantage point, when something does a great job at solving a problem better than everything else nobody spends their days trying to read about it, everyone quietly starts using it. It is undeniable that Rust gets mentioned a lot because any mention of Rust brings the clicks. It is a big deal in that sense. But something being used to compel readers into reading content suggests an emotional longing that isn't being satisfied by the technical reality.
- jdw64 3mo ago
  What is that emotional longing, exactly? I don't really know. First, to be honest about my own feelings toward Rust: as you know, Rust's traits feel like a mix of Haskell's typeclasses and OOP, and that mashup of multiple languages just didn't click with me. I'm not a fan of solving compiler puzzles either. Especially when I've used AI to generate Rust code, it produced a lot of bad code relying heavily on clone, so it's not a language I'm particularly fond of. In that sense, I do understand part of what you're saying. I suppose this is exactly the "emotional longing that isn't being satisfied by the technical reality" you mentioned. So then why does the community keep holding Rust up as this symbol? That's the hard part. Rust's promise is solving undefined behavior. But UB has already been largely solved by GC languages too. So what is it about Rust that pulls people in? Is it because it replaces C and C++, the oldest legacy in programming? Or is it because it's hard for a new superstar to emerge within the legacy that C and C++ created, so people are drawn to Rust as a fresh language? I really don't know. It's a tough question.

mowens3 3mo ago

I accidentally spent last week living in libghostty without knowing it. I was using rootshell, an iOS terminal app built on it. It fixed all my Claude Code scrolling and session problems on iPad. It's the first tmux experience that's felt like a native shell to me. Totally awesome.

swah 3mo ago
How good is that setup to interact with agents on the go?
- mowens3 3mo ago
  [dead]

hudiahs 3mo ago

[flagged]

hudiahs 3mo ago

[flagged]

hudiahs 3mo ago

[flagged]

hudiahs 3mo ago

[flagged]

hudiahs 3mo ago

[flagged]

rustystump 3mo ago

Woof. Back before rust was a thing in uni all the c++ guys shat on the newbies using java and not a real language. The entire rust vs c++\c vs zig vs odin etc is so stupid. Like it is the same culture that has always been there in elitist systems language people. Meanwhile the vast majority of programmers are happily clacking away in python or js or elm or lua or whatever is getting the job done.

geraneum 3mo ago

It's so sad that Rust vs Zig has been dragged into the AI psychosis vs anti AI narratives. I feel people are taking sides or picking and choosing now based on their allegiance and religious values. What good comes out of this?

marand23 3mo ago
It's just standard nerd drama. Nothing good comes of it but it doesn't matter at all either. Just shake your head and move on with your life.
- geraneum 3mo ago
  > It's just standard nerd drama. The elephant in the room are the trillion $ companies having a horse in this race.
deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]

guesswho_ 3mo ago

[dead]

brownpoints 3mo ago

I don’t like the zig culture. There’s no better way to put it.

27183 3mo ago
Does it really matter? I don't like much of the overbearing "rust culture" but I love the language and many libraries and projects are exceptionally high quality. I also like zig, people are building cool things with it. I have far less experience with it than rust but it looks interesting. I don't really get all the culture stuff, it seems like misspent energy.

dbdr 3mo ago

> I don’t like the Rust culture. There’s no better way to put it. Every time I’ve interacted with them or hear how they talk about Rust, I just don’t like it. I wonder if it's not that different people have entirely different experiences: If you are outside the rust community, you'll mostly interact in the context of language flame wars, "why don't you just rewrite it in rust", etc. That is, you interact with the (small) part of the rust community that is most likely to want to dismiss other languages and want to brag. I consider myself in the rust community, on reddit, the rust forum, etc, and I find it extremely well-meaning, inclusive, supportive of beginners, thoughtful, and generally a very pleasant bunch.

z0ltan 3mo ago
[dead]
pdpi 3mo ago
Zealots are a problem in every community, sadly. Rust zealots are in the unfortunate position of having the tiniest bit of objective truth on their side — all else being equal, most C software would indeed benefit from being written in Rust instead. The zealots just don’t understand (or acknowledge) how “all else being equal” does all the heavy lifting. As somebody who’s fascinated by programming languages in general, I’m quite keen on Zig. I prefer Rust, and disagree with a bunch of things Zig does, but admire the language for trying.
- amiga386 3mo ago
  > all else being equal, most C software would indeed benefit from being written in Rust instead I don't even think this is true. You can certainly say "the security of computer systems would be a little bit better if most software was written in memory safe languages" (even more so if you went a bit further and said "with automatic memory management"). However, a lot of software exists and is useful, and the only reason it exists is because the author(s) found a way they liked to express that software. So, for example, there are millions of companies out there, especially small ones, running all their finances on Excel. Not even accounting software. Excel. I am totally OK with this. I do not need all these companies to rewrite their Excel workflows into frontend applications backed by a relational database, even though that would be "better" in a lot of ways (more robust, easier to backup, easier to bring someone else onto...). Those little business owners understand Excel and build models and count numbers and they're happy with that. If some kind of edict compelled them to use something "proper" instead, they might not even go into business, and the world would lose whatever it is their business does. The same thing goes for software and languages. Each language, whether it's F#, Haskell, Common Lisp, PHP, ... brings with it its own kinds of expressiveness and usefulness, and ecosystems of programmers and libraries/modules form around it. Some languages are a better "fit", sometimes for the problem domain, sometimes for the programmer's mind, sometimes for community building. It's difficult to compare any two languages because of this, and if you were to say "language X should not exist, all software written in X should've been written in language Y", you have to accept in your thought experiment that were that the case, their is likely a huge amount of software which would not exist just out of the people who made it not being happy about language Y and, if it were the only choice, would choose not to create the software they created in language X at all.

xyzsparetimexyz 3mo ago

What does ghostty do better than say alacritty?

gen2brain 3mo ago
Does alacritty have, and/or work on a library that is reusable in other projects? If not, there is that to start.
- xyzsparetimexyz 3mo ago
  Why would I need that
  - LtWorf 3mo ago
    To embed it into an IDE?
    - trashface 3mo ago
      Why would I need that
      - LtWorf 3mo ago
        Test your software? Test your software with a debugger? Check a manpage?
simgt 3mo ago
ghostty has tabs and splits for instance, alacritty is deliberately minimalistic

TheChaplain 3mo ago

I've tried to learn rust of the longest time but failed, it's not the community that is the problem but the language itself. It is far from aesthetically pleasing, a child of perl and c++ meta template programming that inherited the worst traits of both. Go and Python are my current preference, and C being an old soul mate.

worrycue 3mo ago
> C being an old soul mate. Maybe try Odin. Based on what I have read, it’s basically C capability-wise with better ergonomics - a simple language; no objects and limited compile time shenanigans.
- sethops1 3mo ago
  I'd like to try out Odin and also Inko, which looks like Rust and Go had a baby. https://inko-lang.org https://inko-lang.org
Zambyte 3mo ago
I have often described Zig to people as a middle ground between C and Go. It sounds like you might really enjoy it.

Esophagus4 3mo ago

> How can we push terminals harder? > I don’t support pushing terminals to the extreme… Reminds me of what Warp has become these days

hncharlatans 3mo ago

[flagged]

cassepipe 3mo ago

> I want to make the terminal a special place for applications. The PTY’s in-band signalling (an unstructured byte stream with escape sequences) is a big problem. The Nushell ecosystem tries to fix it with another layer, but we need a fundamental improvement. Many people dislike the Microsoft ecosystem, but PowerShell gets a lot right with structured data. I wish they would say more. The little nushell I used was a real pleasure to work with but they seem to imply there are limitations to the approach (one more layer ?). It seems the model to emulate is powershell but what does powershell do better than nushell ? I though it was essentially the same approach

Analemma_ 3mo ago
Structured data as the communication medium between shell applications is so obviously a good thing, once you've used it, the Unix way of chopping up text with flags and formatting utilities seems barbaric. PowerShell got it half-right but blundered by talking in binary blobs of .NET objects instead of structured text; it was an understandable decision given how Microsoft worked at the time, but held it back from greatness. But it's not clear how to get from here to there; Nushell doesn't seem to be catching on. I sometimes fantasize about adding two more standard streams, stdstructin and stdstructout, to go with stdin/stdout/stderr, which by informal or formal standard would write JSON (or whatever). Then coreutils and other programs could adopt them gradually and fall back to stdin/stdout whenever encountering a program not using them, and we could have gradual migration while keeping backward compatibility.

mintflow 3mo ago

> Back to Zig, Zig has a really polarizing specific stance on what it does from technology, to community management and funding to PR, blog posts and how they talk. I don’t agree with all of it but I so respect that they are unapologetically weird. So I continue to support them financially and use their technology because I support people trying to be their own person. I read the full articles and always like what Mitchell trying to express, the above is an example

Aurornis 3mo ago
That's the most eloquently diplomatic way to address it. He really does have a way with words. At the same time, it makes me a little sad that when pressed, the best thing that could be said about Zig is that it's unapologetically weird right after a sentence about not agreeing with how they manage the project. I had high hopes for Zig, but the current situation feels like they're actively moving toward being a niche language and away from being something that I could make a case for in a business context.
- veqq 3mo ago
  > when pressed, the best thing that could be said about Zig is What do you mean? We didn't really discuss technical aspects etc. and he said he does like how they manage the project.
  - franktankbank 3mo ago
    The person you are replying to is on every Zig thread bashing it.
    - Aurornis 3mo ago
      You must have me mistaken for someone else because that's not true on multiple levels.
  - Aurornis 3mo ago
    > he said he does like how they manage the project. That's the diplomatic part. He sidesteps the problems by saying that he doesn't agree with all of it (which leaves it ambiguous) but then pivots to praising the way they're unapologetic and weird. > I don’t agree with all of it but I so respect that they are unapologetically weird.