Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: Zli – A Batteries-Included CLI Framework for Zig

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 41 posts

Re: Show HN: Zli – A Batteries-Included CLI Framework for Zig

#11

Post by arp242 »

quotemstr wrote: post #8
arp242 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wish people wouldn't hardcode terminal escape codes. A bunch of commonly used escape codes are pretty much universally identical. I wrote about this before: https://www.arp242.net/safeterm.html By and large I think terminfo/$TERM is outdated, or at least partly. It's a 1970s/80s thing when terminals all did radically different things. But that hasn't been the case for decades now. You still need it for some thing…

Except all those times you don't want color at all. > By and large I think terminfo/$TERM is outdated, or at least partly. It's not outdated. It's a Chesterton's fence. Disregard for interoperability and feature discovery is why the terminal ecosystem has such immense difficulty getting traction on advanced features.

NO_COLOR exists, and is fairly widely supported. TERM=dumb to disable colour was always a hack at best because this also disables other things like "clear line" and generally leads to weird output.

> It's a Chesterton's fence.

It's not. The world has changed. Everyone uses \x1b[1m to make text bold today but in the past there were a few dozen ways from different vendors of (hardware) terminals to make text bold. But this situation no longer exists. Like I already said: you still need it for some things – there's a reason I compiled a "safe terminal escape code" list. But for many things you don't.

Re: Show HN: Zli – A Batteries-Included CLI Framework for Zig

#12

Post by quotemstr »

AndyKelley wrote: post #9
quotemstr wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're using libc already. There is no such thing as a pure zig program. Please, be a good citizen of the ecosystem. If I were trying a program and saw that it disrespected me by ignoring a clear preference in my environment not to use colors, I wouldn't use that program again.

This is factually incorrect. While some operating systems use libc as the syscall ABI, this is not the case for Windows or Linux. On those systems, by default, Zig programs do not link libc; they make DLL calls or syscalls directly. The project in question, however, does seem to link libc in the build script for no reason, as well as create a static library for no reason (it doesn't export any functions). As Loris po…

> On those systems, by default, Zig programs do not link libc; they make DLL calls or syscalls directly.

Well, that makes me think a lot less of Zig. Bypassing libc makes programs less cooperative members of the broader ecosystem. There's value in libc being able to act as a userspace intermediary between programs and the kernel. (That's why Windows doesn't provide a way to make direct system calls: you're going to go through kernel32/user32/etc. -> ntdll.dll and _then_ the kernel.)

Go bypassing libc causes all sorts of annoying havoc, e.g. fakeroot stuff not working. This is not behavior to be encouraged.

And for what benefit? Being able to say you're libc-free, as if that were a feature not a bug? You don't even have split stacks. Is it just that libc has "c" in the name and you want to make sure nobody thinks you're C? libc being called lib-c is an historical artifact. It's not even about C itself. It's more like Windows ntdll.

Bypassing libc is fundamentally selfish behavior. It breaks a longstanding ecosystem coordination mechanism for zero actual benefit.

But hey, I can still use "zig cc" as a convenient cross-compiler when I'm writing in a better-behaved language -- so thanks, I guess.

Re: Show HN: Zli – A Batteries-Included CLI Framework for Zig

#13

Post by quotemstr »

arp242 wrote: post #11
quotemstr wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except all those times you don't want color at all. > By and large I think terminfo/$TERM is outdated, or at least partly. It's not outdated. It's a Chesterton's fence. Disregard for interoperability and feature discovery is why the terminal ecosystem has such immense difficulty getting traction on advanced features.

NO_COLOR exists, and is fairly widely supported. TERM=dumb to disable colour was always a hack at best because this also disables other things like "clear line" and generally leads to weird output. > It's a Chesterton's fence. It's not. The world has changed. Everyone uses \x1b[1m to make text bold today but in the past there were a few dozen ways from different vendors of (hardware) terminals to make text bold. But…

NO_COLOR is far from universally supported (even people who bother to check TERM don't know about it) and typically isn't configured to pass through sudo or ssh.

Re: Show HN: Zli – A Batteries-Included CLI Framework for Zig

#14

Post by arp242 »

quotemstr wrote: post #13
arp242 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NO_COLOR exists, and is fairly widely supported. TERM=dumb to disable colour was always a hack at best because this also disables other things like "clear line" and generally leads to weird output. > It's a Chesterton's fence. It's not. The world has changed. Everyone uses \x1b[1m to make text bold today but in the past there were a few dozen ways from different vendors of (hardware) terminals to make text bold. But…

NO_COLOR is far from universally supported (even people who bother to check TERM don't know about it) and typically isn't configured to pass through sudo or ssh.

> NO_COLOR is far from universally supported

I never claimed that. The sudo or ssh configuration is up to you. Or else there's |cat, which often works when NO_COLOR doesn't.

Either way, terminfo was never intended to allow users to disable colours. Certainly not via TERM=dumb – that was always a hack. If you want to disable colours then there are better ways.

Re: Show HN: Zli – A Batteries-Included CLI Framework for Zig

#15

Post by caeser »

AndyKelley wrote: post #9
quotemstr wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're using libc already. There is no such thing as a pure zig program. Please, be a good citizen of the ecosystem. If I were trying a program and saw that it disrespected me by ignoring a clear preference in my environment not to use colors, I wouldn't use that program again.

This is factually incorrect. While some operating systems use libc as the syscall ABI, this is not the case for Windows or Linux. On those systems, by default, Zig programs do not link libc; they make DLL calls or syscalls directly. The project in question, however, does seem to link libc in the build script for no reason, as well as create a static library for no reason (it doesn't export any functions). As Loris po…

i do link libc because i just copied build.zig from another project i made zig-dotenv and forgot to remove the line

seems like i created a bit of a fuss there, my bad

Re: Show HN: Zli – A Batteries-Included CLI Framework for Zig

#17

Post by Graziano_M »

quotemstr wrote: post #12
AndyKelley wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is factually incorrect. While some operating systems use libc as the syscall ABI, this is not the case for Windows or Linux. On those systems, by default, Zig programs do not link libc; they make DLL calls or syscalls directly. The project in question, however, does seem to link libc in the build script for no reason, as well as create a static library for no reason (it doesn't export any functions). As Loris po…

> On those systems, by default, Zig programs do not link libc; they make DLL calls or syscalls directly. Well, that makes me think a lot less of Zig. Bypassing libc makes programs less cooperative members of the broader ecosystem. There's value in libc being able to act as a userspace intermediary between programs and the kernel. (That's why Windows doesn't provide a way to make direct system calls: you're going to g…

On windows you make system calls through the DLLs because the system calls can change on you. On linux you're pretty much guaranteed that the API to the kernel will not change. It will get extended, but the semantics of old calls will not change).

Re: Show HN: Zli – A Batteries-Included CLI Framework for Zig

#18

Post by bsder »

quotemstr wrote: post #2

No terminfo support? I'm probably tilting at windmills here, but I wish people wouldn't hardcode terminal escape codes. Considering zig's good interop with C, wiring up a call to tigetstr(). It's also important not to emit escape codes at all when TERM=dumb. (You'll get this behavior automatically if you implement color support by asking terminfo to the escape codes.) const c = @cImport({ @cInclude("ncurses.h"); @cIn…

> I'm probably tilting at windmills here, but I wish people wouldn't hardcode terminal escape codes.

Please, no. There is no reason for this to be querying a hack from 1978 in 2025 when there are effectively two output terminal protocols--Windows and ANSI. And there is only a single terminal input protocol (kitty) that isn't brain damaged and allows you to do something super complex like "detect when Shift Key is pressed and released".

Ghostty actually does something like you ask, and I really wish it wouldn't. It's a pain in the ass with virtualization. I have Ghostty on my host, but I have to install Ghostty in all my guest instances to pick up some stupid termcap/terminfo entry, or I get garbage all over my terminal.

Post reply on HN