this is what I've been waiting for a low level language. please no more scripting language TUIs!
There has been no reason to wait... Codex is written in rust. -- So is deepseek-tui.
Forgot to add an open source qualifier. I use codex lol
Zerostack – A Unix-inspired coding agent written in pure Rust
11–20 of 334 posts
Re: Zerostack – A Unix-inspired coding agent written in pure Rust
#12"RAM footprint: ~8MB on an empty session, ~12MB when working" I like this, Claude Code is using multiple gigabytes, which is really annoying on lowend laptops
Isn't that because of the context window size?
Hi, I'm the developer of zerostack!
No, the memory footprint is not beacuse of the context window size: on my benchmarks, with a 128k context loaded, and it jumped from 8MB (without any chat/context loaded) to 11MB.
The reasons why the memory footprint of zerostack are:
- Rust, and not JS/Python, so no interpreters/VMs on top
- Load-as-needed, so we only allocate things like LLM connectors when needed
- `smallvec` used for most of the array usage of the tool (up to N items are stored in stack)
- `compactstring` used for most of the string usage of the tool (up to N chars are stored in stack)
- `opt-level=z` to force LLVM to optimize for binary size and not for performance (even tho we still beat both in TTFT and in tool use time opencode)
- heavy usage of [LTO](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interprocedural_optimization#W...)
Re: Zerostack – A Unix-inspired coding agent written in pure Rust
#13Re: Zerostack – A Unix-inspired coding agent written in pure Rust
#14The codebase was small enough that I handed it over to DeepSeek v4 Flash in Pi to skim through for any risky business, and I didn't find anything concerning. Nice work.
Thanks! Funny enough, a good chunk of the coding was done by Deepseek v4 Flash, while I hand-wrote a couple of the TUI logic, as deepseek kept failing on certain cursor-moving logic, and I fully managed the memory optimization process (as you can read on another comment I left, it both a set of compiler optimizations and usage of certain Rust crates in order to leverage more efficient data structures).
Re: Zerostack – A Unix-inspired coding agent written in pure Rust
#15"RAM footprint: ~8MB on an empty session, ~12MB when working" I like this, Claude Code is using multiple gigabytes, which is really annoying on lowend laptops
Isn't that because of the context window size?
The context window is not on your system. It's on the server with the model. There may be some local prompt caching, of some sort, but you're not locally hosting the context unless you're also locally hosting the model.
Re: Zerostack – A Unix-inspired coding agent written in pure Rust
#16The codebase was small enough that I handed it over to DeepSeek v4 Flash in Pi to skim through for any risky business, and I didn't find anything concerning. Nice work.
> I handed it over to DeepSeek v4 Flash in Pi to skim through for any risky business
Doesn't prompt injection make that a rather flimsy investigation?
Re: Zerostack – A Unix-inspired coding agent written in pure Rust
#17Funny this comes out today. I was just about to start to write one in rust. It's amazing having opencode slowly leak memory and end up becoming 6gbs on a large project and then get slower and slower.
Will check this out! Seems cool!
Re: Zerostack – A Unix-inspired coding agent written in pure Rust
#18Given agent harnesses affect so much of the performance of models, it would be great to see some kind of benchmark on how this tool performs compared to claude/codex/opencode/pi etc.
Hi! While I didn't try any agent benchmark, I already though of this possible issue, and I tried to approach it on two different levels:
1. The tools that are given to the agent are almost the same to the one defined in Opencode, except for Skills and Subagents (both features not implemented in zerostack)
2. Zerostack is prompt-based, so that it ships with a set of .md files, stored in ~/.config/zerostack/prompt, and that can be selected from the TUI in order to activate different 'agents': as you can see from the README, it is designed to contain the most important feautres of superpower + Claude's front-end design + git worktree support and Ralph Wiggum loops (both as integrated features)
Re: Zerostack – A Unix-inspired coding agent written in pure Rust
#19The codebase was small enough that I handed it over to DeepSeek v4 Flash in Pi to skim through for any risky business, and I didn't find anything concerning. Nice work.
Thanks! Funny enough, a good chunk of the coding was done by Deepseek v4 Flash, while I hand-wrote a couple of the TUI logic, as deepseek kept failing on certain cursor-moving logic, and I fully managed the memory optimization process (as you can read on another comment I left, it both a set of compiler optimizations and usage of certain Rust crates in order to leverage more efficient data structures).
Taking notes and comparing this against my own (non coding agent) Rust TUI project, thank you! I'm new to Rust so this is a helpful baseline.
Re: Zerostack – A Unix-inspired coding agent written in pure Rust
#20this is what I've been waiting for a low level language. please no more scripting language TUIs!
Rust, a language with affine types, generics, lifetimes, deep static analysis, hygienic macros, etc is not low-level. It's nearly as high-level as Haskell (without HKTs though).
It just does not rely on GC and allows to manage resources efficiently. This efficiency is partly due to its being so high-level.