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

Re: Interview with Mitchell Hashimoto about Ghostty and Zig

#241

Post by bmitc » Fri, Jul 10, 2026, 8:40 PM UTC

amiga386 wrote: post #199

pdpi wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zealots are a problem in every community, sadly. Rust zealots are in the unfortunate position of having the tiniest bit of objective truth on their side — all else being equal, most C software would indeed benefit from being written in Rust instead. The zealots just don’t understand (or acknowledge) how “all else being equal” does all the heavy lifting. As somebody who’s fascinated by programming languages in general…

> all else being equal, most C software would indeed benefit from being written in Rust instead I don't even think this is true. You can certainly say "the security of computer systems would be a little bit better if most software was written in memory safe languages" (even more so if you went a bit further and said "with automatic memory management"). However, a lot of software exists and is useful , and the only re…

> and the only reason it exists is because the author(s) found a way they liked to express that software.

In a discussion about comparing two languages, there's an implication there that they found a way they liked to express their idea in a particular language that couldn't be done in the other just as well if not better.

Doing things well in C requires a large amount of things that just don't happen if you're writing the same program in Rust. And Rust greatly enables domain-driven design that basically doesn't exist in any C program.

Re: Interview with Mitchell Hashimoto about Ghostty and Zig

#242

Post by vkazanov » Fri, Jul 10, 2026, 9:13 PM UTC

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #223

pjmlp wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The practical and useful innovations were invented else, Rust made them mainstream.

The borrow checker in Rust is frankly novel. Cyclone had something somewhat similar, but not the same. The broader ML-like type system in Rust is not novel, but the integration of the borrow checker -- and its move semantics more broadly -- with it... that form honestly is an innovation. And one I'd have a hard time living without at this point.

True! the borrow checker is a special thing. This is what i mean when i say "explicit data flow analysis".

In a way this is compiler internals exposed to a programmer.

Re: Interview with Mitchell Hashimoto about Ghostty and Zig

#243

Post by swiftcoder » Fri, Jul 10, 2026, 9:14 PM UTC

torginus wrote: post #230

swiftcoder wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Huh. I never knew that was a thing. Although sounds cool. Though if you do that, or take something like a ncurses UI, and start turning it into something nicer, at what point do you have something that's not a terminal? But I guess there's promise in having something that's like a Jupyter notebook, but for files.

Yeah, I mean, a well-designed GUI is hard to beat, but for one-off tools/scripts, being able to dump images to the terminal is often really nice

Re: Interview with Mitchell Hashimoto about Ghostty and Zig

#244

Post by blooalien » Fri, Jul 10, 2026, 9:48 PM UTC

jcgl wrote: post #156

em-bee wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and new shells are developing features to handle structured data like json: here is an elvish shell command that converts a freetube playlist from json into a list of urls grouped by author: for i (cat 'freetube-playlist-favorites.db' | from-json)["videos"] { mkdir -p $i['author'] print http://youtu.be/$i['videoId'] >> $i['author']/get } here is one to get a list of devices connected to my zerotier network curl -s -H…

Great example! How do you like using elvish? Even though I am a proponent of structured data and like PowerShell a lot (mentioned in a nearby comment of mine), I use fish as my regular shell. Big fan of fish's careful focus on user experience, but would be open to trying something structured.

I'ma huge fan of `fish` myself, but I've been watching `elvish` for a while now, and some of their scripting stuff really is awfully nice.

Re: Interview with Mitchell Hashimoto about Ghostty and Zig

#245

Post by franktankbank » Fri, Jul 10, 2026, 9:53 PM UTC

veqq wrote: post #238

Aurornis wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the most eloquently diplomatic way to address it. He really does have a way with words. At the same time, it makes me a little sad that when pressed, the best thing that could be said about Zig is that it's unapologetically weird right after a sentence about not agreeing with how they manage the project. I had high hopes for Zig, but the current situation feels like they're actively moving toward being a niche…

> when pressed, the best thing that could be said about Zig is What do you mean? We didn't really discuss technical aspects etc. and he said he does like how they manage the project.

The person you are replying to is on every Zig thread bashing it.

Re: Interview with Mitchell Hashimoto about Ghostty and Zig

#246

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

firesteelrain wrote: post #160

konart wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>niche Literally all companies I've worked for a know about use Vault for storing secrets to be used during deployment. It would be interesting to learn that this is different elsewhere.

If in Cloud, then go Cloud native. No reason to run Vault. But on prem, there are limited options and Vault fits the bill. If you want auto unseal with HSM and don't have to worry about the unseal key shards, then you can hook it up the HSM. Of course, HSMs are expensive and you also have to buy a Vault license.

Oh, I never thought about the "in Cloud" part.

Re: Interview with Mitchell Hashimoto about Ghostty and Zig

#247

Post by konart » Fri, Jul 10, 2026, 10:03 PM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #120

konart wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>niche Literally all companies I've worked for a know about use Vault for storing secrets to be used during deployment. It would be interesting to learn that this is different elsewhere.

Yes, we always use the vault/secrets infrastructure of the respective cloud vendor. Never used the product Vault.

Yeah, I kind of failed to realise that some (many?) companies literally build around one of the cloud vendors.

Re: Interview with Mitchell Hashimoto about Ghostty and Zig

#248

Post by fuzztester » Fri, Jul 10, 2026, 11:00 PM UTC

adrian_b wrote: post #97

mountainriver wrote: post #17

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 consider Ghostty the best video terminal emulator that I have used. For now, I have not encountered any noticeable bug yet, even if I spend a lot of time using it.

Is there a way to encounter an unnoticeable bug?

>I do not doubt that there may exist some bugs or missing features, but it seems unlikely that they can be seen during typical workflows.

Boyoboyoboy. It seems that you have never heard of the concept of combinatorial explosion, which in software testing, means that due to the zillions of different execution paths, plenty of bugs, which are undetected, can still exist, and can very easily not be found by just one lone ranger using some software package, no matter how long they use it, at least within a few years.

>For decades, I have used a great number of video terminal emulators.

Were you using that great number of emulators serially, or parallely, in those decades?

If parallely, you must have spend less time on each, than "for decades" implies.

If serially, you must have spent a great number of decades to use a great number of emulators.

This seems like a hastily put together comment.

Re: Interview with Mitchell Hashimoto about Ghostty and Zig

#249

Post by Aurornis » Fri, Jul 10, 2026, 11:27 PM UTC

franktankbank wrote: post #245

veqq wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> when pressed, the best thing that could be said about Zig is What do you mean? We didn't really discuss technical aspects etc. and he said he does like how they manage the project.

The person you are replying to is on every Zig thread bashing it.

You must have me mistaken for someone else because that's not true on multiple levels.

Re: Interview with Mitchell Hashimoto about Ghostty and Zig

#250

Post by Aurornis » Fri, Jul 10, 2026, 11:29 PM UTC

veqq wrote: post #238

Aurornis wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the most eloquently diplomatic way to address it. He really does have a way with words. At the same time, it makes me a little sad that when pressed, the best thing that could be said about Zig is that it's unapologetically weird right after a sentence about not agreeing with how they manage the project. I had high hopes for Zig, but the current situation feels like they're actively moving toward being a niche…

> when pressed, the best thing that could be said about Zig is What do you mean? We didn't really discuss technical aspects etc. and he said he does like how they manage the project.

> he said he does like how they manage the project.

That's the diplomatic part. He sidesteps the problems by saying that he doesn't agree with all of it (which leaves it ambiguous) but then pivots to praising the way they're unapologetic and weird.

> I don’t agree with all of it but I so respect that they are unapologetically weird.