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

Zerostack – A Unix-inspired coding agent written in pure Rust

crates.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 334 posts

Re: Zerostack – A Unix-inspired coding agent written in pure Rust

#41

Post by hiAndrewQuinn »

koito17 wrote: post #32
hiAndrewQuinn wrote: post #9

The codebase was small enough that I handed it over to DeepSeek v4 Flash in Pi to skim through for any risky business, and I didn't find anything concerning. Nice work.

Since the OP stated they used DeepSeek V4 Flash for generating a lot of the code, I decided to check whether there were any outdated dependencies. In my experience, with Rust projects, if you do not instruct models (even Claude 4.7 Opus) to use `cargo add` instead of manually editing the Cargo.toml, you will almost certainly get out-of-date dependencies added to your project. Manually checking the dependencies used b…

Hidden telemetry was my big concern, yes; the abort thing wasn't caught as a security thing by DeepSeek V4 Flash but it was mentioned by Claude 4.7 Opus (I wanted to compare and contrast here), and Flash brought it up later when I asked it about performance tuning.

`cargo add` tip is very helpful, I had a hunch this happened in my own Rust project and I think you just filled in the missing piece for me there.

Re: Zerostack – A Unix-inspired coding agent written in pure Rust

#42

Post by gidellav »

koito17 wrote: post #32
hiAndrewQuinn wrote: post #9

The codebase was small enough that I handed it over to DeepSeek v4 Flash in Pi to skim through for any risky business, and I didn't find anything concerning. Nice work.

Since the OP stated they used DeepSeek V4 Flash for generating a lot of the code, I decided to check whether there were any outdated dependencies. In my experience, with Rust projects, if you do not instruct models (even Claude 4.7 Opus) to use `cargo add` instead of manually editing the Cargo.toml, you will almost certainly get out-of-date dependencies added to your project. Manually checking the dependencies used b…

Hi, nice comment!

1. I had experience not only with wrong versions selected by the agents, but also weird crates (ex. choosing a crate with 10 github stars when a more complete and more supported one was available), reason why now I always choose the dependencies and then I let the agent work.

2. Yes, some of the provider code could be made using macros, I am just lazy... But thanks for the tip! I will save it for later.

3. No telemetry, and it can be checked thanks to the fact that there are no HTTP calls outside of the MCP implementation (via rmcp) and LLM connectors (via rig)

4. Yes, i set panic handler to 'abort', thinking that I would've get a nice size decrease: i yet have to experience a panic on this project, but I will revert it to default behavior if the binary size saving is really so small

5. While it is async, the entire project runs on one thread (as expressed in the main.rs with ```#[tokio::main(flavor = "current_thread")]```), as it allows for a nice ~8MB memory saving (so, 50% off) and no real performance loss, being such a simple tool.

---

P.S. Just switched back to default settings for panic handler

Re: Zerostack – A Unix-inspired coding agent written in pure Rust

#43

Post by gidellav »

esafak wrote: post #40
gidellav wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi! While I didn't try any agent benchmark, I already though of this possible issue, and I tried to approach it on two different levels: 1. The tools that are given to the agent are almost the same to the one defined in Opencode, except for Skills and Subagents (both features not implemented in zerostack) 2. Zerostack is prompt-based, so that it ships with a set of .md files, stored in ~/.config/zerostack/prompt, and…

It's been said before, but it is important to prospective users, so it bears repeating: screenshots and benchmarks, please; it helps users decide whether to invest time in it. The ability to transfer settings from other agents would be great too.

1. I will add some screenshots tomorrow

2. As said before, there are no benchmarks right now, but it is good enough for me, so I hope it's good enough for y'all :)

3. Transfering settings from other agents is out-of-scope for a minimalstic coding agent, but the idea is that, apart from MCP server, the rest might just force you to learn how zerostack works, because of design choices such as not having Skills or having certain specialized tools integrated (worktrees and loops).

Re: Zerostack – A Unix-inspired coding agent written in pure Rust

#44

Post by jswny »

frio wrote: post #30
gidellav wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually though about this issue, but while Pi can have this script-like environment thanks to the fact that it's based on an interpreted language (TypeScript), Rust has its own limitation as a compiled language. I decided to allow for customization in a different way: 1. The prompt library (~/.config/hypernova/prompts/) acts as a simpler alternative to Skills, with the built-in prompts that should replace superpow…

I've been trying to use `Deno` underneath `Rust` so that the tools can still be written in Typescript and thus self-mutated without the compilation step (but I can still try to do clever things with V8 Isolates or similar). It's been an ugly experiment so far; I'm vaguely thinking a simpler model would be to just define a binary "API" and run tools by exec-ing binaries.

Why not WASM?

Re: Zerostack – A Unix-inspired coding agent written in pure Rust

#45

Post by nine_k »

gidellav wrote: post #23
nine_k wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rust, a language with affine types, generics, lifetimes, deep static analysis, hygienic macros, etc is not low-level. It's nearly as high-level as Haskell (without HKTs though). It just does not rely on GC and allows to manage resources efficiently. This efficiency is partly due to its being so high-level.

While I agree on the fact that it allows to manage resources efficiently, I don't agree on the fact the efficency derives from it being high-level; from a purely tecnical standpoint, i could skim off 2-3MB from the memory footprint by writing the code in pure C, as there are some unused parts of Rust's std that cannot be removed without recompiling std. This is obv only a technical talk, as writing an AI TUI in pure…

That's why I said "part of its efficiency". Rust can do RAII, can optimize things more aggressively because of no aliasing ever in safe code, and because of known lifetimes, it can offer fearless concurrency™. Rust can also support highly optimized data representations (see how Optional works, or other ADTs, etc) which languages like Haskell, to say nothing of Python, cannot offer because of GC and boxing.

Lower-level languages like Zig or even Go, to say nothing of C, lack many of the high-level language features that power this efficiency.

Re: Zerostack – A Unix-inspired coding agent written in pure Rust

#48

Post by all2 »

throwa356262 wrote: post #2

"RAM footprint: ~8MB on an empty session, ~12MB when working" I like this, Claude Code is using multiple gigabytes, which is really annoying on lowend laptops

I'm building an agent framework in golang and it is extremely light weight. Startup time is under 1/2 second, and RAM usage is really low. I have a 12 year old laptop and it happily runs without slowing down.

There's no reason what is essentially a string concat engine should be slow on any hardware, including old hardware.

Re: Zerostack – A Unix-inspired coding agent written in pure Rust

#50

Post by aschar »

frio wrote: post #34
gidellav wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to be honest and tell you that try to load such an heavy runtime as a scripting layer is not a great idea; at the same time I can tell you that I am working on another Rust project where I also needed scripting, and after three attempts I landed on rhai ( https://rhai.rs/ ) ( https://rhai.rs/book ). You might find it nice for pretty much all use cases except for high-performance scripting (so, if you are not t…

Yeah, it's been a bit of a dead end. I didn't want the heavy runtime but felt it was worth disproving after experimenting rather than ruling out off the bat. Even before getting it running, the dependency list alone was pretty discouraging, especially given the storm of supply chain attacks these days. Rhai looks nice, I'll take a look, thanks! And good luck with Zerostack.

[dead]
Post reply on HN