181–190 of 281 posts
I accidentally spent last week living in libghostty without knowing it. I was using rootshell, an iOS terminal app built on it. It fixed all my Claude Code scrolling and session problems on iPad. It's the first tmux experience that's felt like a native shell to me. Totally awesome.
How good is that setup to interact with agents on the go?
> 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…
Rust was ~70% of my last job, and the other Rust engineers there were very competent -- large volumes of high-quality, high-impact code. In my rust community interactions at the time, also interactions with my colleagues, I definitely noticed some unsavory trends. An example pattern is: me> This [API | language feature | whatever] seems harder to use than it should be. them> No, it's actually not. me> Here's irrefuta…
It used to be that programming languages were mostly boring and predictable, with maybe questionable semantics (const etc.), but generally that messiness meant they were good enough at getting the job done.
PL research and theory focused on mostly FP, Ocaml family and other functional languages, with things like advanced type inference system, based on postgraduate category theory. These people have fought endless and bitter mental battles with each other, a glimpse of which occasionally leaked to HN. Some paper about a noteworthy discovery in solving a problem incomprehensible to the general public. Some guy complaining about how he tried to educate average programmers about how unsound their programs were, and being taken aback at how these people didn't want to be saved from their own stupidity. Some article complaining about how if every programmer was just 15 IQ points smarter, they'd be all doing FP. But mostly this community kept to themselves.
Thanks to Rust, all these ideas have found purchase in real practical software. Now the academics get to torment themselves with the moral duty of saving the everyman from using less theoretically sound programming languages.
(Disclaimer - I don't hate Rust, I think it's great they made this breakthrough from academia to regular boring programming, but they need to respect the nuance of the world that exists outside the walls of research institutions)
> 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've had rust developers quite often..tell me that it's immoral to use a language that doesn't have memory safety
Me: You're right. Java has come a long way. Let's download...
Rust: No! No no on. Not like that!
---
Memory safety is a worthwhile goal, but combining it with manual memory management is wrong for most tasks. Just use a damn GC. Rust's safety-plus-malloc niche should be much smaller than it is.
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 have discovered Ghostty only this year, and I have switched to it a few months ago. For decades, I have used a great number of video terminal emulators. I have used for long time intervals at least 8 or 9 video terminal emulators, from the original xterm until the one used immediately before ghostty, which was kitty (and including Konsole, the Gnome terminal, the XFCE terminal, WezTerm and others). I consider Ghost…
> 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.
He didn't say that in the interview. Or, he didn't make nearly as broad a claim as you have made. He said:
>> If you want me to maintain a flag to remove it, I can ask you to maintain a fork removing it. Telling people to “fork it” often upsets them.
The context of his statement was people wanting a feature (search as one example) removed (or removable, via feature flag). In that case, the fork is about as hard to maintain as the feature flag, assuming the software is reasonably well organized.
But in general, your claim is not true, and it's not what he wrote.
> You should address the point Mitchell made
No, I have no obligation to respond to something that he didn't say.
Related from 13h ago: "My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite" by Zig's author Andrew Kelley https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48843352
And for those interested in Mitchell's take on it: https://x.com/mitchellh/status/2075261972061594106?s=20 . TL;DR: No comment.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
[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.
Of all the complaints about rust, this strikes me as one of weirdest. How much code do you actually write for architectures outside the Tier 3 support list?
> 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've had rust developers quite often..tell me that it's immoral to use a language that doesn't have memory safety
Almost all HN software related discussion will have some Rust folks saying 'yeah I have a rust project for that', or 'just write this in rust and it will be better', so annoying after seeing those each time, it's like the house-window sales guy keeps knocking my door every day and never goes away.
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 think you're mistaking text-with-structured data for structured data itself. Because unix shell is irrevocably text-oriented, kludging in something like JSON is basically the best that can be done when you start to want to do structured operations on structured data. (I'm sympathetic to your point about the AWS CLI tools doing JSON by default though--that just sounds like bad design.) Being text-oriented imposes dr…
podman image ls --all | sed 's/\s\s\+/\t/g' | tee >(head -n 1) >(tail -n +2 | sort -hrk 5) >/dev/null
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have discovered Ghostty only this year, and I have switched to it a few months ago. For decades, I have used a great number of video terminal emulators. I have used for long time intervals at least 8 or 9 video terminal emulators, from the original xterm until the one used immediately before ghostty, which was kitty (and including Konsole, the Gnome terminal, the XFCE terminal, WezTerm and others). I consider Ghost…
I use the terminal that happens to be at hand, which is usually the one that ships with the OS, or the one in VSCode. I don't have high demands on the terminal, and I don't understand what problems are there to solve, as long as it handles unicode and control sequences correctly.
It turns out its not 1986 anymore, and sometimes we want to output gasp images to our terminals