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Interview with Mitchell Hashimoto about Ghostty and Zig

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141–150 of 281 posts

Re: Interview with Mitchell Hashimoto about Ghostty and Zig

#141
post #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 (sm…

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Re: Interview with Mitchell Hashimoto about Ghostty and Zig

#142

I don’t like the zig culture. There’s no better way to put it.

Does it really matter? I don't like much of the overbearing "rust culture" but I love the language and many libraries and projects are exceptionally high quality. I also like zig, people are building cool things with it. I have far less experience with it than rust but it looks interesting. I don't really get all the culture stuff, it seems like misspent energy.

Re: Interview with Mitchell Hashimoto about Ghostty and Zig

#143

I'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.

> C being an old soul mate.

Maybe try Odin. Based on what I have read, it’s basically C capability-wise with better ergonomics - a simple language; no objects and limited compile time shenanigans.

Re: Interview with Mitchell Hashimoto about Ghostty and Zig

#145
post #96
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

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

You mean your LLMs had an easier time with Elixir. Do you actually know either of the two yourself?

Re: Interview with Mitchell Hashimoto about Ghostty and Zig

#146
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…

> Every post about programming languages seems to mention Rust. Even C++ articles bring up Rust, and Zig articles bring up Rust.

"Even C++" makes no sense. That's exactly where you'd expect it to be mentioned because Rust is pretty much aiming to be a C++ replacement. Mentions in the context of Zig also make sense, because Zig is aiming to be a C replacement in the same way Rust is aiming for C++, and C/C++ are overlapping areas.

You don't see much mention of Rust in discussions about something like Lua, because those are very distinct.

Some other reasons you might see it mentioned fairly often: Rust solves some issues at compile time that many languages solve at runtime using GC, making lower level programming more approachable for high level programmers and broadening its target audience. It has also had extremely active evangelists all over the place for a very long time, causing not mentioning it to trigger annoying derailment of discussions.

Re: Interview with Mitchell Hashimoto about Ghostty and Zig

#147
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ooo... Any chance you remember where you read that? I'd love a reference to check it out. Sounds interesting!

I'm pretty sure they're referring to this one: https://corecursive.com/building-powershell-with-jeffrey-sno...

That's the one!

Re: Interview with Mitchell Hashimoto about Ghostty and Zig

#149

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

> I find it to be way buggier than iterm with a fraction of the features. Hmm... I'm using ghostty (on macOS) since it was released and have yet to encounter a single bug. Iterm2 simply got too fat and slow over time, which was the point where I went terminal-shopping (first wezterm, which is also fine, now sticking with ghostty).

I was experiencing daily crashes of ghostty on mac with no crash report, always during claude sessions, and after the crash, I'd lose my session. Though, now we can cmd+f to search ghostty output as of the most recent version.

Re: Interview with Mitchell Hashimoto about Ghostty and Zig

#150
post #106

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…

> 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.

No, I mean by using only custom types for things like arrays, strings and pointers, which do access checks and automatic memory release, and not using unsafe features like the built-in arrays, strings and pointers, or the incorrect integer type conversions inherited from C.

For maximum safety, beyond what Rust offers by default, in C++ it is easy to replace the built-in integer types with custom integer types, which check for overflows and allow only the correct type conversions. It is also easy to define distinct types for various kinds of physical quantities, for increased safety.

You do not need to run anything in your head. With appropriate type definitions, a C++ compiler will do anything that is required.

The problem is that because of the requirement for backwards compatibility, C++ is a huge junk collection. I think that more than half of C++ consists of obsolete features, which should never be used in new programs, and this is a serious difficulty for newbies. There are various C++ style guides, but in my opinion even most of those are not very inspired.

Despite of its defects, C++ still has the advantage of extreme customizability. It is easy to write programs that appear to be written in a language that has no resemblance with C++ (inclusively by having different keywords and what appears to be a different syntax), but nonetheless they are valid C++ programs.

Such a customized C++ variant can mimic any safer language.

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