Live data from Hacker News

Interview with Mitchell Hashimoto about Ghostty and Zig

alexalejandre.com

111–120 of 281 posts

Re: Interview with Mitchell Hashimoto about Ghostty and Zig

#111
> I don’t like the Rust culture. There’s no better way to put it. Every time I’ve interacted with them or hear how they talk about Rust, I just don’t like it.

I wonder if it's not that different people have entirely different experiences:

If you are outside the rust community, you'll mostly interact in the context of language flame wars, "why don't you just rewrite it in rust", etc. That is, you interact with the (small) part of the rust community that is most likely to want to dismiss other languages and want to brag.

I consider myself in the rust community, on reddit, the rust forum, etc, and I find it extremely well-meaning, inclusive, supportive of beginners, thoughtful, and generally a very pleasant bunch.

Re: Interview with Mitchell Hashimoto about Ghostty and Zig

#112

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.

Not trying to derail the discussion, but the reason for me to leave the Rust ecosystem in favor of Go was also the implied culture. Experienced Go devs that stay inside the ecosystem try to write their libraries as "pure go" libraries with zero dependencies other than the upstream core libraries (or golang.org/x if needbe), which results in a very low maintenance ecosystem. This combined with the strong toolchain mak…

There is also many compile to Go languages today, that add many befefits from the MLs with still 100% Go interrop. I would say lisette is probably the one that has most momentum right now.

Re: Interview with Mitchell Hashimoto about Ghostty and Zig

#113

> 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…

> This is just so weird to me, because I would say the same about Zig.

I think you missed his point. He's arguing against homogeneity of (cyber) culture. For example, programming languages that promise to do everything. Rust fanatics indeed can be a bit like that. Every time I see a thread here about someone building something in Zig, they storm in and start arguing 'why not rust!?'.

The fact that you don't like the zig community is healthy and not weird. Don't worry about it. You don't have to like everything and you can disagree on taste.

Re: Interview with Mitchell Hashimoto about Ghostty and Zig

#114

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.

Not trying to derail the discussion, but the reason for me to leave the Rust ecosystem in favor of Go was also the implied culture. Experienced Go devs that stay inside the ecosystem try to write their libraries as "pure go" libraries with zero dependencies other than the upstream core libraries (or golang.org/x if needbe), which results in a very low maintenance ecosystem. This combined with the strong toolchain mak…

> And that's exactly the thing that somehow never happened in the Rust ecosystem. I always joke that the Rust ecosystem has more OpenGL bindings than developers, because there's just so many low quality bindings or wrappers out there that the ecosystem in result got too noisy to maintain.

Rust seems to attract a lot of horizontal programming. I have done mainly that so far and I LOVE Rust for it.

AIUI, horizontal programming is fully building out each abstraction before you start building on top of it, as opposed to vertical programming, which generally seeks to accomplish the task as directly and straightforwardly as possible, and only abstract if needed.

This leads to things like the proliferation of bindings, abstraction layers, frameworks etc. with little downstream users to show for it. And often little influence from experience using them. Sometimes very technically impressive but otherwise not always fleshed out to the point of being practically usable.

I am sure there's tons of toxicity all over the place too but I chalk it up to differing mindsets / patterns of development.

Re: Interview with Mitchell Hashimoto about Ghostty and Zig

#115
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…

> with appropriate rules, restrictions and discipline

This completely misses the point.

Re: Interview with Mitchell Hashimoto about Ghostty and Zig

#116
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.

[dead]

Re: Interview with Mitchell Hashimoto about Ghostty and Zig

#118
post #43
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Interesting. That's a lot to type on the fly, but I can posit some benefits.

Re: Interview with Mitchell Hashimoto about Ghostty and Zig

#119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I am not a huge Rust fan but the language did bring a few practical and useful innovations, while also keeping a focus on practice. And no, C++ just doesn't make the same things easy or clean. And no, "discipline and appropriate rules" were never enough.

The practical and useful innovations were invented else, Rust made them mainstream.

Re: Interview with Mitchell Hashimoto about Ghostty and Zig

#120
post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, we always use the vault/secrets infrastructure of the respective cloud vendor.

Never used the product Vault.

Post reply on HN