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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

#171

Post by jjice »

largePanda9 wrote: post #162
dbdr wrote: 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…

What would you say is a good starting point for learning Rust? I’ve been curious about it for a while, but coming from a mostly Python, I’m straight up intimidated and fear wasting time trying to learn something I won’t really ever fully be competent in…

The official rust book (officially available free online) is the way to good. So good I purchased it when it went paperback. It's a top tier language book.

Re: Interview with Mitchell Hashimoto about Ghostty and Zig

#172

Post by torginus »

tialaramex wrote: post #165
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…

I thought I would like Powershell but it was another big disappointment for me. It's got a lot of the unpleasant clunkiness that something like the Bourne shell owes to decades of compatibility, but Microsoft doesn't have that excuse. Despite this, it's gratuitously incompatible with itself, I had code which worked fine, we upgraded Powershell oh, now that won't work, just fix all the scripts. Crazy. It clearly wants…

This is my opinion as well. Powershell and object shells are much better and the way to go imo. Also Powershell code is fast owing to running on the .NET VM.

But the actual UX is just convoluted and horrible. For example, the person who decided that commands without a ; at the end of the line should just vomit their outputs to the enclosing function's clearly hasn't heard of the principle of least surprise.

PS just does so many plain weird and unintuitive things, which is worsened by the fact that it looks like a boring old programming language, while clearly not being one.

Re: Interview with Mitchell Hashimoto about Ghostty and Zig

#173

Post by up2isomorphism »

dbdr wrote: 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…

You are exactly depicting the problem of the rust culture.

Re: Interview with Mitchell Hashimoto about Ghostty and Zig

#174

Post by tialaramex »

adrian_b wrote: post #150
dbdr wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

No. C++ doesn't have a garbage collector, and it doesn't have a borrowck, as a result any reference types are subject to ordinary human error because it can't garbage collect the target objects and it doesn't know when to destroy them otherwise.

The work to try to address this for C++ 29, half-finished and untried as it is - is extremely restrictive, you'd likely hate it, and that's just to solve this, the relatively easy problem.

Thing is, Rust wasn't content just to solve that easy problem. (Safe) Rust also doesn't have data races. The C++ standard doesn't say very much about data races, can't help you ensure they don't happen - it just explains that if they do that's Undefined Behaviour, game over.

Re: Interview with Mitchell Hashimoto about Ghostty and Zig

#175

Post by LtWorf »

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]

You mean ADA? I'd agree, at least gcc can compile it so it's not limited to the very few architectures that rust supports.

Re: Interview with Mitchell Hashimoto about Ghostty and Zig

#176

Post by wmedrano »

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…

This is not surprising and perhaps one of the things I respect about it. Zig is pretty minimalist and I would prefer denying my pet features over becoming design by committee.

I'm a bit curious, what features could you not do without?

Re: Interview with Mitchell Hashimoto about Ghostty and Zig

#177

Post by larme »

dbdr wrote: 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…

This description sounds like a cult.

Re: Interview with Mitchell Hashimoto about Ghostty and Zig

#178

Post by RamblingCTO »

dbdr wrote: 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…

I had a senior dev in my previous team who pushed to write microservices for a web SaaS in rust. We already had some in Go and it worked phenomenal. Easy to learn, write, maintain, effing fast and wonderful tooling around graphQL. His only argument was "Rust is a better language and it's memory safe". That sums up the interactions I have with rust fanboys quite well. No one in the team could do rust, the added headaches around memory safety have no benefit for services like this at all and there's no tooling or hiring benefit as well (quite the opposite I guess). There wasn't a single sensible argument to be made for rust imho. I overruled him on that of course.

Re: Interview with Mitchell Hashimoto about Ghostty and Zig

#179

Post by Zambyte »

TheChaplain wrote: post #140

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.

I have often described Zig to people as a middle ground between C and Go. It sounds like you might really enjoy it.

Re: Interview with Mitchell Hashimoto about Ghostty and Zig

#180

Post by geraneum »

marand23 wrote: post #153
geraneum wrote: post #91

It's so sad that Rust vs Zig has been dragged into the AI psychosis vs anti AI narratives. I feel people are taking sides or picking and choosing now based on their allegiance and religious values. What good comes out of this?

It's just standard nerd drama. Nothing good comes of it but it doesn't matter at all either. Just shake your head and move on with your life.

> It's just standard nerd drama.

The elephant in the room are the trillion $ companies having a horse in this race.

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