Interview with Mitchell Hashimoto about Ghostty and Zig

skhameneh

> 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 just do something different in Zig (completely misunderstanding my ask, with little interest to explore my actual requirements). I remember watching HN and seeing every time there was something Rust related trending, there was ALWAYS a post made shortly after trying to hype Zig and this went on for like 4 years. I'm not a Rust contributor and I don't care for some of the challenges that come with Rust, but I love what it accomplished and I find it does it very well. Back then I found the Rust community had interest and respect for Zig, so the discourse was very much one sided.

bel8

Related from 13h ago: "My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite" by Zig's author Andrew Kelley https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48843352

Jtsummers

> 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, but then GTK changes, now I have to support that change myself (assuming it is relevant to me or my community of users), or figure out a way to integrate Mitchell's changes into my fork, or I risk losing my customizations by having to rollback to baseline if the differences between my fork and baseline are too great. If the system is well-engineered (the work on libghostty helps here) then you can keep that common core without forking, and fork just things on the periphery of the system. But well-engineered is not common.

waterTanuki

> The philosophy behind [Rust] and the language itself is really good. I just don’t want to use it. That's all that needed to be said. He only makes himself and the rest of the Zig "community" look as petty as some of the worst Rust people with the surrounding remarks. Why does anyone need to care what a few randoms think of a language? Either it gets used or it doesn't.

tecoholic

Man, these are the kinds of things that I am so happy to read. People who think and care deeply about what they do, take pragmatic decisions that appears right to them and explain why they do things the way they do. Very motivating. Literally moved me from the couch to the work desk .

sgarland

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; that’s what boto3 and its ilk are for. But if humans are reading it, why default to something that they’re almost certainly going to be piping into jq if only for the formatting help?

arikrahman

Looking forward to Andrew Kelley interview's sequel and Jeaye's reaction to this.

greatony

Reading this and Bun's Rust transition blog side by side just gives me a lot fun. I'm a big fan of Rust, and as well as Ghostty. Picking proper programming language is mostly about the product you are making and the problem you are solving. My choice for my robot control system is Rust because I want zero-cost abstraction, no GC jitter, memory safety and avoid race conditions. Then I moved my focus to AI agents and web applications, I pick TypeScript to take advantage of the whole ecosystem and no need to sync between backend and frontend codes. I do not think products like Ghostty could benefit from Rust's memory safety feature a lot, but it do requires more attention to fight against the lifetime checker

jdw64

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 languages better than they did.

rustystump

Woof. Back before rust was a thing in uni all the c++ guys shat on the newbies using java and not a real language. The entire rust vs c++\c vs zig vs odin etc is so stupid. Like it is the same culture that has always been there in elitist systems language people. Meanwhile the vast majority of programmers are happily clacking away in python or js or elm or lua or whatever is getting the job done.