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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

#101

Post by flohofwoe »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #65
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…

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.

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++.

Re: Interview with Mitchell Hashimoto about Ghostty and Zig

#102

Post by flohofwoe »

hoppp wrote: post #35
ori_b wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In computing this is almost a tradition (Commodore vs Atari vs PC, Windows vs UNIX vs MacOS). It hasn't exactly hindered progress, I'd rather call it healthy competition ;)

Still though: Amiga 4 ever! :D

Re: Interview with Mitchell Hashimoto about Ghostty and Zig

#103

Post by stackghost »

echelon wrote: post #74
tstack wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

[flagged]

Why are Rust people so insufferable?

We get it. You like Rust. It's not a panacea.

Re: Interview with Mitchell Hashimoto about Ghostty and Zig

#105

Post by legulere »

applfanboysbgon wrote: post #50
spacechild1 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

You need to write some unsafe code in a kernel, but most of the code does not have to be, which allows you to eliminate memory unsafety from almost all code and give more scrutiny to the parts the compiler cannot guarantee for you. I don’t know though if the affected code in openbsd would have needed to be unsafe. Moving towards rust is a possible way for kernels as Linux has shown, but I guess for OpenBSD the pros and cons are different, as it’s striving for a more minimal system and has been affected far less by memory unsafety issues.

Re: Interview with Mitchell Hashimoto about Ghostty and Zig

#106

Post by dbdr »

adrian_b wrote: post #93
echelon wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Rust is one of the safer languages, but saying that it is "the safest language" is just a baseless exaggeration. Decades before Rust and long before the simplified language that was C, there were safe programming languages, where all invalid operations, numeric overflows or out-of-bounds accesses generated exceptions and where use-after-free was impossible, because either garbage collectors or reference counts were u…

> Even in C++, with appropriate rules, restrictions and discipline you can write programs that are guaranteed to be at least as safe as any Rust program

If by discipline, you mean running something akin to the borrow checker in your head, that's essentially tautologically true. The issue with that is that it's mentally draining and/or you will still make mistakes sometimes.

Re: Interview with Mitchell Hashimoto about Ghostty and Zig

#107

Post by zdkaster »

jdw64 wrote: post #56

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 l…

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

Re: Interview with Mitchell Hashimoto about Ghostty and Zig

#109

Post by Cilvic »

NetMageSCW wrote: post #27
Jtsummers wrote: post #9

> 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,…

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…

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.

Re: Interview with Mitchell Hashimoto about Ghostty and Zig

#110

Post by konart »

firesteelrain wrote: post #53
mountainriver wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

>niche

Literally all companies I've worked for a know about use Vault for storing secrets to be used during deployment.

It would be interesting to learn that this is different elsewhere.

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