Interview with Mitchell Hashimoto about Ghostty and Zig • Hacker News Board

Re: Interview with Mitchell Hashimoto about Ghostty and Zig

#201

Post by asa400 » Fri, Jul 10, 2026, 4:38 PM UTC

torginus wrote: post #182

hansvm wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Its academia. Rust is admirable for having been able interesting programming language research into a mainstream language, but this had the implication of bringing the people who did said research with it into the communities. 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…

I've been using Rust in anger since ~2018 and I guess I've had completely different experience, especially compared to what I was mostly doing before, which was Scala.

Scala (the v2 series, I haven't used v3 at all) was, to a first approximation, a language of, by, and for graduate students in language research that accidentally escaped the lab and briefly took over the data engineering space. Multiple competing category theory libraries, vicious fights about which was more pure, continued debates about the beauty and confusion of implicits resolution, the list goes on.

Rust seems downright blue collar in comparison. So much of the Rust I've written and the teams I've been on, and the open source we've used has been exactly the kind of stuff we would have used Java for 15 years ago. Boring practical stuff. Same goes for the community interactions. "Here's how to get this thing working", "here's a better way to do this", "maybe you didn't know but here's a cool way to speed up that section", etc.

Sure, if you go into the development process of The Rust Language Itself, people are talking about compiler minutiae and using datalog to do type resolution, but that _really_ has not been my experience as a user. Me and everyone I know use Rust like the Golang people say they use Golang.

In fact the crux of the difference between the Rust community and the Scala community has been Rust's continued obsession with developer experience/user experience (whatever you want to call it). The error messages, the tooling, etc. Scala had none of this. A disproportionately significant section of the Scala people were obsessed with type theory, quite often to the detriment of usability/programming experience.

I respect your experience with the Rust community but I haven't had this experience at all. Totally unrecognizable to me.

Re: Interview with Mitchell Hashimoto about Ghostty and Zig

#202

Post by cassepipe » Fri, Jul 10, 2026, 4:39 PM UTC

> I want to make the terminal a special place for applications. The PTY’s in-band signalling (an unstructured byte stream with escape sequences) is a big problem. The Nushell ecosystem tries to fix it with another layer, but we need a fundamental improvement. Many people dislike the Microsoft ecosystem, but PowerShell gets a lot right with structured data.

I wish they would say more. The little nushell I used was a real pleasure to work with but they seem to imply there are limitations to the approach (one more layer ?). It seems the model to emulate is powershell but what does powershell do better than nushell ? I though it was essentially the same approach

Re: Interview with Mitchell Hashimoto about Ghostty and Zig

#203

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Jul 10, 2026, 4:43 PM UTC

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…

[deleted]

Re: Interview with Mitchell Hashimoto about Ghostty and Zig

#204

Post by rustystump » Fri, Jul 10, 2026, 4:45 PM UTC

echelon wrote: post #130

rustystump wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rust will never be the dominant output by a country mile. It will be python and typescript.

> It will be python and typescript. A waste. This code will be high-defect and slow. All of your LLM outputs should be Rust.

> rust? Ya it is the community

Re: Interview with Mitchell Hashimoto about Ghostty and Zig

#205

Post by jcgl » Fri, Jul 10, 2026, 4:49 PM UTC

unfunco wrote: post #196

jcgl wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 --sort=size …or was the point more about doing it in a pipeline?

Yes, the point was about doing it in a pipeline. The pipeline is the basis for composition of plain text in the unix shell. If something as basic as sorting a table is hard to do, it should make us question just how good the unix shell/plain text philosophy actually is.

Baking --sort flags into shell tools is a sign that the tools do not compose well.

Re: Interview with Mitchell Hashimoto about Ghostty and Zig

#206

Post by mintflow » Fri, Jul 10, 2026, 4:52 PM UTC

> Back to Zig, Zig has a really polarizing specific stance on what it does from technology, to community management and funding to PR, blog posts and how they talk. I don’t agree with all of it but I so respect that they are unapologetically weird. So I continue to support them financially and use their technology because I support people trying to be their own person.

I read the full articles and always like what Mitchell trying to express, the above is an example

Re: Interview with Mitchell Hashimoto about Ghostty and Zig

#207

Post by the_gipsy » Fri, Jul 10, 2026, 4:55 PM UTC

Jtsummers wrote: post #185

the_gipsy wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should address the point Mitchell made: maintaining a fork is roughly the same as maintaining a feature flag.

> 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 rem…

You're right, he said the request is equivalent.

Also, take it easy, it was merely a suggestion. The interesting part was comparing a feature/flag/branch to a fork, to me.

Re: Interview with Mitchell Hashimoto about Ghostty and Zig

#208

Post by ktimespi » Fri, Jul 10, 2026, 5:00 PM UTC

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…

It does need quite a bit of time to be productive with... That being said, Rust by Example is good

Re: Interview with Mitchell Hashimoto about Ghostty and Zig

#209

Post by blanched » Fri, Jul 10, 2026, 5:09 PM UTC

fp64 wrote: post #198

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 also do not like the Rust culture. I think the core problem is that it is so centered around identity, and this leaks into how the arguments are presented and how "outsiders" are judged. Which your example illustrates.

I don’t really understand what you mean. How can you have a community without identity? Isn’t that just a category? i.e. “a person who uses rust” vs “a member of the rust community”. There’s nothing wrong with either one, but the latter tends to define the culture.

Re: Interview with Mitchell Hashimoto about Ghostty and Zig

#210

Post by asa400 » Fri, Jul 10, 2026, 5:10 PM UTC

9rx wrote: post #124

jdw64 wrote: 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…

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…

> 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.

Funny you should say this. 4 of the last 5 companies I've worked at have quietly been using Rust in small but key parts of their systems. As far as I know, no one outside of those companies ever publicized it. They adopted it organically and kept it around because it kept working.

Everyone loves to whine about the Rust Evangelism Strike Force but the amount of "quiet Rust" out in the wild is a lot larger than most people would guess.