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Interview with Mitchell Hashimoto about Ghostty and Zig

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Re: Interview with Mitchell Hashimoto about Ghostty and Zig

#31

Post by ori_b »

nixpulvis wrote: post #3
skhameneh wrote: post #2

> 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 ju…

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

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

Re: Interview with Mitchell Hashimoto about Ghostty and Zig

#32

Post by tredre3 »

sgarland wrote: post #20

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; tha…

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.

Re: Interview with Mitchell Hashimoto about Ghostty and Zig

#33

Post by nixon_why69 »

sgarland wrote: post #20

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; tha…

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.

Re: Interview with Mitchell Hashimoto about Ghostty and Zig

#34

Post by turtlebits »

waterTanuki wrote: post #15

> 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.

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.

Re: Interview with Mitchell Hashimoto about Ghostty and Zig

#35

Post by hoppp »

ori_b wrote: post #31
nixpulvis wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

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.

Re: Interview with Mitchell Hashimoto about Ghostty and Zig

#36

Post by bagxrvxpepzn »

skhameneh wrote: post #2

> 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 ju…

[dead]

Re: Interview with Mitchell Hashimoto about Ghostty and Zig

#37

Post by slekker »

mountainriver wrote: post #17
skhameneh wrote: post #2

> 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 ju…

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

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

Re: Interview with Mitchell Hashimoto about Ghostty and Zig

#38

Post by garbagepatch »

skhameneh wrote: post #22
nine_k wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

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.

Re: Interview with Mitchell Hashimoto about Ghostty and Zig

#39

Post by ks2048 »

nixpulvis wrote: post #3
skhameneh wrote: post #2

> 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 ju…

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

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

Re: Interview with Mitchell Hashimoto about Ghostty and Zig

#40

Post by hombre_fatal »

sgarland wrote: post #20

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; tha…

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.

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