Interview with Mitchell Hashimoto about Ghostty and Zig

https://alexalejandre.com/programming/interview-with-mitchell-hashimoto/

by veqq • 13 days ago

405 223 13 days ago

skhameneh3• 13 days 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.

nixpulvis2• 13 days ago

Culture wars are sadly one of the biggest inhibitors of progress throughout all of technology.

ori_b• 13 days ago

Why does liking something different from you imply there's a war?

ks2048• 13 days ago

It seems to hinge a lot on what is “culture”.

dbetteridge• 13 days ago

You could just have left off the last part of that :D

Culture wars are sadly one of the biggest inhibitors of progress

pron2• 13 days 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.

cogogo• 13 days ago

The year is 2026 and the only thing about coding that matters anymore is taste.

Edit: Thought about scare quoting “taste”

nine_k• 13 days ago

Maybe it's even the other way around: different cultures and tastes give birth to different languages and community norms around them.

Crisco• 13 days 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• 13 days 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.

mountainriver2• 13 days 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• 13 days 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

jeffyaw• 13 days 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.

firesteelrain2• 13 days 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

mdgld• 13 days ago

What features from iterm do you miss? I’ve found ghostty to be more performant and aesthetically pleasing and haven’t missed anything

adrian_b• 13 days ago

I have discovered Ghostty only this year, and I have switched to it a few months ago.

For decades, I have used a great number of video terminal emulators. I have used for long time intervals at least 8 or 9 video terminal emulators, from the original xterm until the one used immediately before ghostty, which was kitty (and including Konsole, the Gnome terminal, the XFCE terminal, WezTerm and others).

I consider Ghostty the best video terminal emulator that I have used. For now, I have not encountered any noticeable bug yet, even if I spend a lot of time using it.

Nor have I encountered any feature that I really miss (though a few things that worked in other emulators, do not work, at least not with the default configuration, e.g. setting the title of a tab window with the standard escape sequence of characters; but the ghostty titles are fine, i.e. the pwd value while in shell and the invoked command otherwise).

I do not doubt that there may exist some bugs or missing features, but it seems unlikely that they can be seen during typical workflows. I have used it only in Linux, so I do not know anything about bugs under macOS.

flohofwoe5• 13 days ago

I find it to be way buggier than iterm with a fraction of the features.

Hmm... I'm using ghostty (on macOS) since it was released and have yet to encounter a single bug. Iterm2 simply got too fat and slow over time, which was the point where I went terminal-shopping (first wezterm, which is also fine, now sticking with ghostty).

latexr2• 13 days ago

You’re making it seem like fewer features is a negative, but that’s not always the case. Even for programming languages, I can think of how I semi-regularly see people lamenting that Swift got too complex, while praising Go for being a small language.

fukaiall• 13 days 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.

latexr2• 13 days 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• 13 days 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• 13 days 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• 13 days 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).

insanitybit• 13 days 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.

reinitctxoffset• 13 days 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.

spacechild1• 13 days 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• 13 days 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.

tstack2• 13 days ago

You just got a tiny taste of what Rust enthusiasts have been doing to every C++ related submission

Which is what C++ enthusiasts have done to C enthusiasts and C enthusiasts have done to assembly enthusiasts.

throwaway274483• 13 days ago

The entire concept of publicity as a competition is baffling to me. Who gives a shit?

cookiengineer• 13 days ago

Not trying to derail the discussion, but the reason for me to leave the Rust ecosystem in favor of Go was also the implied culture.

Experienced Go devs that stay inside the ecosystem try to write their libraries as "pure go" libraries with zero dependencies other than the upstream core libraries (or golang.org/x if needbe), which results in a very low maintenance ecosystem. This combined with the strong toolchain makes it joyful to work with.

I still don't agree with a lot of design choices of the language, but I realize that I can be more efficient if I am setting aside my opinion.

And that's exactly the thing that somehow never happened in the Rust ecosystem. I always joke that the Rust ecosystem has more OpenGL bindings than developers, because there's just so many low quality bindings or wrappers out there that the ecosystem in result got too noisy to maintain.

I don't want to write more (verbose) code. I want to write less.

I kind of already know that my comment goes to shit in terms of downvotes, but that's what I expect while writing this. How dare I criticized Rust as a language? How dare I, a fulltime noob, do this? Rust is better, always!

...the Rust ecosystem is just so effing toxic. I am glad that I left it. I just got tired of being angry at random online things all the time. Go is my happy place where my annoyances are reduced to Cgo, maps, and the unsafe package <3

kjs3• 13 days 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• 13 days 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• 13 days 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.

flohofwoe5• 13 days 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• 13 days 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• 13 days 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• 12 days 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• 13 days 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

dom96• 13 days ago

And for those interested in Mitchell's take on it: https://x.com/mitchellh/status/2075261972061594106?s=20.

TL;DR: No comment.

Gobd• 13 days ago

That's the only right take, no need to make a comment on someone else expressing their opinion

throwaway902984• 12 days ago

https://nitter.net/mitchellh/status/2075261972061594106?s=20

Jtsummers2• 13 days 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.

tecoholic2• 13 days 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• 13 days 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• 13 days 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.

the_gipsy3• 13 days ago

You should address the point Mitchell made: maintaining a fork is roughly the same as maintaining a feature flag.

Jtsummers2• 12 days ago

maintaining a fork is roughly the same as maintaining a feature flag.

He didn't say that in the interview. Or, he didn't make nearly as broad a claim as you have made. He said:

> If you want me to maintain a flag to remove it, I can ask you to maintain a fork removing it. Telling people to “fork it” often upsets them.

The context of his statement was people wanting a feature (search as one example) removed (or removable, via feature flag). In that case, the fork is about as hard to maintain as the feature flag, assuming the software is reasonably well organized.

But in general, your claim is not true, and it's not what he wrote.

You should address the point Mitchell made

No, I have no obligation to respond to something that he didn't say.

waterTanuki• 13 days 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• 13 days 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• 13 days 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.

tecoholic2• 13 days 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• 13 days 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.

veqq2• 3 days ago

There are many more! https://alexalejandre.com/interviews/

sgarland• 13 days 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• 13 days 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• 13 days 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.

nixon_why692• 13 days ago

I always hated powershell for the same reason, and then I read a really long retro by the guy who ran the project and it makes sense now.

Basically Unix has a long tradition of "everything is a file" and a big ecosystem of coreutils that are based around text and windows.. didn't. You can't look at /dev or /etc and learn anything about the machine. They had a few generations of APIs and wanted to give admins and power users any shell at all instead of a GUI. So the shell is centered around making those APIs accessible, rather than piping grep and sed or whatever.

digdugdirk• 13 days ago

Ooo... Any chance you remember where you read that? I'd love a reference to check it out. Sounds interesting!

hombre_fatal• 13 days ago

I'm not sure I agree.

In the AWS case the tools talk to an API server, so sure, you can call the API server directly or use a wrapper that does, but what about all the other CLI apps that don't? The CLI program is the API.

I built a CLI program that wraps luks + btrfs, and they only offer a `--json` output option for a few commands. I have to write an ad hoc parser for each command since raw text includes arbitrary formatting and presentation lipstick that the creator came up with. And I have to do extra work to avoid breaking changes at the parser level instead of the higher data level.

If I had to pick between the two, json would at least solve the data representation part so that I can build on top of it. And it's trivial to go data (json) -> pretty print rather than pretty print -> data.

I can see it being annoying if all you care about is using CLI programs by hand, but it seems like a mild upside compared to the downsides the second you want to consume it programmatically, even if it's with a chain of awk, cut, and tr.

zbentley• 13 days ago

Slightly off topic, but it is worth being familiar with AWSCLI’s built in jmespath JSON transformation system. That saves on the need for jq in a lot of cases. Given that awscli bundles that, I generally forgive it for defaulting to JSON (especially given how deeply nested and interlinked many AWS API results are), but reasonable minds can differ. AWSCLI’s schizophrenic use (or not) of pagers for tiny results, on the other hand, is less defensible.

jcgl8• 13 days ago

I think you're mistaking text-with-structured data for structured data itself.

Because unix shell is irrevocably text-oriented, kludging in something like JSON is basically the best that can be done when you start to want to do structured operations on structured data. (I'm sympathetic to your point about the AWS CLI tools doing JSON by default though--that just sounds like bad design.)

Being text-oriented imposes drastic limits on composability. Because there is no structure, every element of a pipeline needs to do its own parsing of the input data. This leads to brittle pipelines where every element is tightly coupled to its input's textual representation.

As an exercise, try to write a pipeline that sorts podman images by size without removing the column headers[0]:

  $ podman image ls --all 
  REPOSITORY                                 TAG         IMAGE ID      CREATED       SIZE
  docker.io/prom/prometheus                  latest      937690d77350  2 months ago  367 MB
  quay.io/keycloak/keycloak                  latest      da9433c9fac3  2 months ago  466 MB
  registry.fedoraproject.org/fedora-toolbox  43          a32da54355ca  4 months ago  2.19 GB
  docker.io/powerdns/pdns-auth-49            latest      8c1385c9deed  4 months ago  208 MB
  docker.io/testcontainers/ryuk              0.13.0      b75bc7ce94c3  6 months ago  7.21 MB

As far as I can tell, there is no way to do this in a manner that's even remotely composable. Your best bet is to basically do everything from within awk. Whatever the result would be, it certainly won't be pretty!

Contrast that with what you can do in PowerShell. You can write a couple of standalone functions[0] that are readable and composable, resulting in this pipeline:

  podman image ls --all |
      Replace-SpacesWithTabs |
      ConvertFrom-Csv -Delimiter "`t" |
      Sort-Object -Property {Convert-HumanSizeToBytes -Size $_.size} -Descending

[0] Repurposing this from a blog post I wrote: https://www.cgl.sh/blog/posts/sh.html#this-should-be-basic

alloyed• 12 days ago

the point is well-taken, but i do want to show the bash version just for fun:

    podman image ls --all | sed 's/\s\s\+/\t/g' | tee >(head -n 1) >(tail -n +2 | sort -hrk 5) >/dev/null

this is _still_ all text, and we're relying heavily on sort to do a bunch of internal parsing and be in agreement with podman about how sizes should be formatted. also, for "real world" work, i dunno if the tee trick here has any kind of order guarantees, just that it works fine in this case. I'd probably just end up dropping the header and living with worse output in reality

unfunco2• 12 days ago

    $ podman image ls --all --sort=size

…or was the point more about doing it in a pipeline?

fragmede2• 10 days ago

It seems the sticking point is the column headers but if you as a human take them off programmatically and put them back on mentally, it's a much easier problem.

tialaramex2• 13 days ago

I thought I would like Powershell but it was another big disappointment for me.

It's got a lot of the unpleasant clunkiness that something like the Bourne shell owes to decades of compatibility, but Microsoft doesn't have that excuse. Despite this, it's gratuitously incompatible with itself, I had code which worked fine, we upgraded Powershell oh, now that won't work, just fix all the scripts. Crazy. It clearly wants an NPM-style experience where you seamlessly incorporate other people's work, but then it doesn't really deliver this well and so you often end up manually copy-pasting.

If Powershell was a one man project and this was their Beta I'd say it is promising. But it's a project from the Microsoft corporation for 20 years. Do better.

torginus4• 12 days ago

This is my opinion as well. Powershell and object shells are much better and the way to go imo. Also Powershell code is fast owing to running on the .NET VM.

But the actual UX is just convoluted and horrible. For example, the person who decided that commands without a ; at the end of the line should just vomit their outputs to the enclosing function's clearly hasn't heard of the principle of least surprise.

PS just does so many plain weird and unintuitive things, which is worsened by the fact that it looks like a boring old programming language, while clearly not being one.

arikrahman• 13 days ago

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

greatony• 13 days 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

jdw643• 13 days 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• 13 days ago

I'm neutral. But sadly, this seems to be always the case when the unorthodox rising star emerges in the society.

9rx2• 13 days 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.

jdw643• 13 days 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.

asa4004• 12 days ago

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.

Funny you should say this. 4 of the last 5 companies I've worked at have quietly been using Rust in small but key parts of their systems. As far as I know, no one outside of those companies ever publicized it. They adopted it organically and kept it around because it kept working.

Everyone loves to whine about the Rust Evangelism Strike Force but the amount of "quiet Rust" out in the wild is a lot larger than most people would guess.

jorams• 13 days ago

Every post about programming languages seems to mention Rust. Even C++ articles bring up Rust, and Zig articles bring up Rust.

"Even C++" makes no sense. That's exactly where you'd expect it to be mentioned because Rust is pretty much aiming to be a C++ replacement. Mentions in the context of Zig also make sense, because Zig is aiming to be a C replacement in the same way Rust is aiming for C++, and C/C++ are overlapping areas.

You don't see much mention of Rust in discussions about something like Lua, because those are very distinct.

Some other reasons you might see it mentioned fairly often: Rust solves some issues at compile time that many languages solve at runtime using GC, making lower level programming more approachable for high level programmers and broadening its target audience. It has also had extremely active evangelists all over the place for a very long time, causing not mentioning it to trigger annoying derailment of discussions.

mowens3• 13 days 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• 13 days ago

How good is that setup to interact with agents on the go?

rustystump• 13 days 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.

geraneum2• 13 days 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• 13 days 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.

geraneum2• 12 days ago

It's just standard nerd drama.

The elephant in the room are the trillion $ companies having a horse in this race.

brownpoints• 13 days ago

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

27183• 13 days 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• 13 days 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.

pdpi3• 13 days 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• 12 days 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.

Cyberdog• 12 days ago

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.

But all other things are not equal, are they? A vital piece of software written in C that has been battle-tested and optimized throughout its two, three, four decades or more of existence does not magically improve if it gets rewritten in Rust. Not only does that not make sense in theory, we've also seen it in reality with the issues with the coreutils rewrites.

You can make a solid argument that new software written completely from zero would be better served by being written in Rust than C. But the "just rewrite it bro" types are so incredibly obnoxious and out of step with reality.

largePanda9• 13 days ago

What would you say is a good starting point for learning Rust? I’ve been curious about it for a while, but coming from a mostly Python, I’m straight up intimidated and fear wasting time trying to learn something I won’t really ever fully be competent in…

mekoka• 12 days ago

The article had great advice on this actually. When asked how to get into C, or whether it was more advisable to learn Zig instead, Mitchell suggested that

It’s more important to learn how computers work and make the language just a means to understanding how they work. [...] even in this age of higher level abstractions and web development, it’s still important to understand the basics of CPU scheduling, memory, cache hierarchies, file systems, disc and file access. When you work directly above the syscall layer, whether in C, Zig or Rust, it really helps you understand what’s happening[...]

jjice• 12 days ago

The official rust book (officially available free online) is the way to good. So good I purchased it when it went paperback. It's a top tier language book.

ktimespi• 12 days ago

It does need quite a bit of time to be productive with... That being said, Rust by Example is good

jononor• 12 days ago

Writing a Python extension would a good way to dip your toes into Rust, and also add a useful skill to Python programming (writing performant extensions). PyO3 is the main project, and the topic has been covered in several talks at Python conferences (check Youtube).

beanjuiceII• 13 days ago

I've had rust developers quite often..tell me that it's immoral to use a language that doesn't have memory safety

quotemstr3• 12 days ago

Rust people: it's wrong to use a language that lacks memory safety and modern developer affordances. Do you really want to spend time debugging crashes and foist security problems on your users?

Me: You're right. Java has come a long way. Let's download...

Rust: No! No no on. Not like that!

---

Memory safety is a worthwhile goal, but combining it with manual memory management is wrong for most tasks. Just use a damn GC. Rust's safety-plus-malloc niche should be much smaller than it is.

synergy20• 12 days ago

The "Rust Evangelism Strike Force" is so annoying and it becomes the major reason I don't want to have anything to do with the language, yes I know it's strange.

Almost all HN software related discussion will have some Rust folks saying 'yeah I have a rust project for that', or 'just write this in rust and it will be better', so annoying after seeing those each time, it's like the house-window sales guy keeps knocking my door every day and never goes away.

hansvm• 12 days ago

Rust was ~70% of my last job, and the other Rust engineers there were very competent -- large volumes of high-quality, high-impact code. In my rust community interactions at the time, also interactions with my colleagues, I definitely noticed some unsavory trends. An example pattern is:

me> This [API | language feature | whatever] seems harder to use than it should be.

them> No, it's actually not.

me> Here's irrefutable proof.

them> Well at least you have memory safety.

me> But...you can have memory safety without this thing being a dumpster fire. Wouldn't that be better?

them> <no concessions, Rust is perfect>

After a few conversations like that, I've literally had those same otherwise high-caliber engineers spend days wrestling with the "easy" thing we were quibbling about. I'm sure it's not intentional, but it comes across as religious gaslighting.

And maybe I just interacted with the wrong people at the wrong point in Rust's lifecycle and the community is mostly very positive. I see enough people with experiences like mine though that I'm not willing to believe it's a truly miniscule fraction of the language's discourse.

torginus4• 12 days ago

Its academia. Rust is admirable for having been able interesting programming language research into a mainstream language, but this had the implication of bringing the people who did said research with it into the communities.

It used to be that programming languages were mostly boring and predictable, with maybe questionable semantics (const etc.), but generally that messiness meant they were good enough at getting the job done.

PL research and theory focused on mostly FP, Ocaml family and other functional languages, with things like advanced type inference system, based on postgraduate category theory. These people have fought endless and bitter mental battles with each other, a glimpse of which occasionally leaked to HN. Some paper about a noteworthy discovery in solving a problem incomprehensible to the general public. Some guy complaining about how he tried to educate average programmers about how unsound their programs were, and being taken aback at how these people didn't want to be saved from their own stupidity. Some article complaining about how if every programmer was just 15 IQ points smarter, they'd be all doing FP. But mostly this community kept to themselves.

Thanks to Rust, all these ideas have found purchase in real practical software. Now the academics get to torment themselves with the moral duty of saving the everyman from using less theoretically sound programming languages.

(Disclaimer - I don't hate Rust, I think it's great they made this breakthrough from academia to regular boring programming, but they need to respect the nuance of the world that exists outside the walls of research institutions)

up2isomorphism• 12 days ago

You are exactly depicting the problem of the rust culture.

larme• 12 days ago

This description sounds like a cult.

RamblingCTO• 12 days ago

I had a senior dev in my previous team who pushed to write microservices for a web SaaS in rust. We already had some in Go and it worked phenomenal. Easy to learn, write, maintain, effing fast and wonderful tooling around graphQL. His only argument was "Rust is a better language and it's memory safe". That sums up the interactions I have with rust fanboys quite well. No one in the team could do rust, the added headaches around memory safety have no benefit for services like this at all and there's no tooling or hiring benefit as well (quite the opposite I guess). There wasn't a single sensible argument to be made for rust imho. I overruled him on that of course.

secondcoming• 12 days ago

I just think it'a visually unappealing language.

fp64• 12 days ago

I also do not like the Rust culture. I think the core problem is that it is so centered around identity, and this leaks into how the arguments are presented and how "outsiders" are judged. Which your example illustrates.

blanched• 12 days ago

I don’t really understand what you mean. How can you have a community without identity? Isn’t that just a category? i.e. “a person who uses rust” vs “a member of the rust community”. There’s nothing wrong with either one, but the latter tends to define the culture.

sph• 12 days ago

It’s like that joke: I admire Jesus Christ, it’s his fan club I really can’t stand.

You can substitute that with Rust and it sums up my feelings. The language is great, the obsession with static typing and memory safety from its fans, as if it’s the panacea to all problems in computing, is obnoxious and smells of inexperience. It’s not a coincidence that Rust these days is baby’s first low level language, so you get a lot of strong, uninformed opinions on software design.

tialaramex2• 12 days ago

Ghandi wasn't making a joke when he said: "I love your Christ but I hate your Christians because your Christians are unlike your Christ.". By this time Ghandi had spent some time reading about Jesus, and interacting with Christians and so this contrast will have been very stark.

xyzsparetimexyz2• 13 days ago

What does ghostty do better than say alacritty?

gen2brain• 13 days ago

Does alacritty have, and/or work on a library that is reusable in other projects? If not, there is that to start.

xyzsparetimexyz2• 13 days ago

Why would I need that

simgt• 13 days ago

ghostty has tabs and splits for instance, alacritty is deliberately minimalistic

TheChaplain• 13 days 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• 13 days 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• 13 days ago

I'd like to try out Odin and also Inko, which looks like Rust and Go had a baby. https://inko-lang.org

Zambyte5• 12 days 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• 13 days 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

cassepipe• 12 days 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_• 12 days 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• 12 days 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

Aurornis3• 12 days 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.

veqq2• 12 days 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.

bmitc3• 12 days ago

moving toward being a niche language and away from being something that I could make a case for in a business context

That indeed seems hard. Also, at this point in time, what would be the benefit of using Zig over Rust?

Interview with Mitchell Hashimoto about Ghostty and Zig

Related Stories