What does ghostty do better than say alacritty?
Does alacritty have, and/or work on a library that is reusable in other projects? If not, there is that to start.
Interview with Mitchell Hashimoto about Ghostty and Zig
131–140 of 281 posts
Re: Interview with Mitchell Hashimoto about Ghostty and Zig
#132> 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,…
You should address the point Mitchell made: maintaining a fork is roughly the same as maintaining a feature flag.
Re: Interview with Mitchell Hashimoto about Ghostty and Zig
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
More Rust users = more Rust libraries = more Rust jobs = more places to do what you enjoy and get paid for it.
By that definition, Javascript is by far the bestest language in the world ;)
It is! It just happens to be one of the worst languages in the world too.
Re: Interview with Mitchell Hashimoto about Ghostty and Zig
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
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I tried that, but the Rust build process was too painful, and agents seemed to burn a lot of tokens guessing how to get the code to compile. I rewrote my project in Elixir and it’s been going much more smoothly
Elixir is great, and I have recently started using it myself, but its not a substitute for Rust. Try writing device driver in Elixir, or anything CPU intensive.
Re: Interview with Mitchell Hashimoto about Ghostty and Zig
#135> 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 (sm…
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Re: Interview with Mitchell Hashimoto about Ghostty and Zig
#136> 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 (sm…
Zealots are a problem in every community, sadly. Rust zealots are in the unfortunate position of having the tiniest bit of objective truth on their side — all else being equal, most C software would indeed benefit from being written in Rust instead. The zealots just don’t understand (or acknowledge) how “all else being equal” does all the heavy lifting.
As somebody who’s fascinated by programming languages in general, I’m quite keen on Zig. I prefer Rust, and disagree with a bunch of things Zig does, but admire the language for trying.
Re: Interview with Mitchell Hashimoto about Ghostty and Zig
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 pro…
As much as I'm put away by the dependency horror I've seen in many Rust projects, this is an interesting observation.
There are many dependency horrors of Rust, especially in larger projects, but I will say I've never been particularly put off by community-maintained crates that are free to make breaking changes for correctness or flexibility. Things like `temporal-rs` feel like a huge win, even given the long tail of crates with outdated dependencies (or overly-rigid APIs, etc.), and I tend to agree with Rust's smaller standard library.
For example, std's linked list seems rarely useful for anything but scripting, and could've easily been a crate. I don't think it's egregious or anything, it's just a bit meh. I don't really use Rust for scripting though (I usually use zsh or TypeScript), so maybe it's super valuable in specific cases.
Re: Interview with Mitchell Hashimoto about Ghostty and Zig
#138Rust 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…
Do you see any other examples of where technical excellence is attention grabbing? From my vantage point, when something does a great job at solving a problem better than everything else nobody spends their days trying to read about it, everyone quietly starts using it. It is undeniable that Rust gets mentioned a lot because any mention of Rust brings the clicks. It is a big deal in that sense. But something being us…
What is that emotional longing, exactly? I don't really know.
First, to be honest about my own feelings toward Rust: as you know, Rust's traits feel like a mix of Haskell's typeclasses and OOP, and that mashup of multiple languages just didn't click with me. I'm not a fan of solving compiler puzzles either. Especially when I've used AI to generate Rust code, it produced a lot of bad code relying heavily on clone, so it's not a language I'm particularly fond of.
In that sense, I do understand part of what you're saying. I suppose this is exactly the "emotional longing that isn't being satisfied by the technical reality" you mentioned.
So then why does the community keep holding Rust up as this symbol?
That's the hard part. Rust's promise is solving undefined behavior. But UB has already been largely solved by GC languages too. So what is it about Rust that pulls people in? Is it because it replaces C and C++, the oldest legacy in programming? Or is it because it's hard for a new superstar to emerge within the legacy that C and C++ created, so people are drawn to Rust as a fresh language? I really don't know. It's a tough question.
Re: Interview with Mitchell Hashimoto about Ghostty and Zig
#139Re: Interview with Mitchell Hashimoto about Ghostty and Zig
#140I've tried to learn rust of the longest time but failed, it's not the community that is the problem but the language itself. It is far from aesthetically pleasing, a child of perl and c++ meta template programming that inherited the worst traits of both.
Go and Python are my current preference, and C being an old soul mate.