Interview with Mitchell Hashimoto about Ghostty and Zig • Hacker News Board

Re: Interview with Mitchell Hashimoto about Ghostty and Zig

#41

Post by skhameneh » Fri, Jul 10, 2026, 1:11 AM UTC

garbagepatch wrote: post #38

skhameneh wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Approximately 5 years ago

Re: Interview with Mitchell Hashimoto about Ghostty and Zig

#42

Post by reinitctxoffset » Fri, Jul 10, 2026, 1:11 AM UTC

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 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.

Re: Interview with Mitchell Hashimoto about Ghostty and Zig

#43

Post by em-bee » Fri, Jul 10, 2026, 1:20 AM UTC

tredre3 wrote: post #32

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.

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 " "https://api.zerotier.com/api/v1/network//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.

Re: Interview with Mitchell Hashimoto about Ghostty and Zig

#44

Post by senderista » Fri, Jul 10, 2026, 1:25 AM UTC

rapind wrote: post #23

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.

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 sam…

In the case of Ruby, the contrast between the early community pre-Rails and what came after is astounding. Partly comes down to the personality differences between Matz and DHH, I guess. I loved the community pre-2005 and had no interest in engaging with it afterward (although I used Rails for a few personal projects).

Re: Interview with Mitchell Hashimoto about Ghostty and Zig

#45

Post by fruit2020 » Fri, Jul 10, 2026, 1:28 AM UTC

jeltz wrote: post #14

cogogo wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The year is 2026 and the only thing about coding that matters anymore is taste. Edit: Thought about scare quoting “taste”

Pretty sure you could have said the same in 1986 and I know for sure you could have in 2006. Not sure why you think people having different tastes is new.

People also stopped coding in 2006?

Re: Interview with Mitchell Hashimoto about Ghostty and Zig

#46

Post by throwaway613746 » Fri, Jul 10, 2026, 1:29 AM UTC

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

#47

Post by spacechild1 » Fri, Jul 10, 2026, 1:38 AM UTC

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 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.

Re: Interview with Mitchell Hashimoto about Ghostty and Zig

#48

Post by jeffyaw » Fri, Jul 10, 2026, 1:43 AM UTC

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

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.

Re: Interview with Mitchell Hashimoto about Ghostty and Zig

#49

Post by zbentley » Fri, Jul 10, 2026, 1:46 AM UTC

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…

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.

Re: Interview with Mitchell Hashimoto about Ghostty and Zig

#50

Post by applfanboysbgon » Fri, Jul 10, 2026, 1:50 AM UTC

spacechild1 wrote: post #47

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 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.

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.