Interview with Mitchell Hashimoto about Ghostty and Zig

62 pointsposted 6 hours ago
by veqq
(alexalejandre.com)

16 Comments

skhameneh

an hour ago

> 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.

mountainriver

4 minutes ago

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

pron

34 minutes ago

> This is just so weird to me, because I would say the same about Zig.

Then why is it weird if you're saying the same thing? Different programming languages appeal to programmers with different tastes, and so it makes sense that some programmers would be drawn to language X and dislike language Y, while others would be the opposite.

nine_k

22 minutes ago

Maybe it's even the other way around: different cultures and tastes give birth to different languages and community norms around them.

cogogo

28 minutes ago

The year is 2026 and the only thing about coding that matters anymore is taste.

Edit: Thought about scare quoting “taste”

pron

17 minutes ago

It's not necessarily the thing that matters most to executives, who are often those making decisions, but it's always been the thing that mattered most to programmers (at least those of them who have any emotions or strong preferences toward programming languages).

jeltz

14 minutes ago

Pretty sure you could have said the same in 1986 and I know for sure you could have in 2006. Not sure why you think people having different tastes is new.

Crisco

23 minutes ago

I’ve worked with people who I appreciate for their unapologetic willingness to be who they are. I might not agree with their opinions and think they’re a little extreme, but I’m glad people like them exist and enjoy seeing what they devote their time to. Based on the rest of Mitchell’s response, I think something like that is what is appreciated about Zig.

I don’t use Zig, and frequently use Rust, but I’ve never really interacted with the core development team for either. I don’t think it’s necessary to care about whatever culture is driving development once it has sufficient velocity. The Rust I use today is more than enough for my needs. Maybe if I were more involved in open source I would better understand why culture matters, but unfortunately I’m mostly a consumer of it, not a producer.

nixpulvis

an hour ago

Culture wars are sadly one of the biggest inhibitors of progress throughout all of technology.

bri3d

20 minutes ago

This is weird to me too, especially to say in the present tense in 2026.

I think I get the point about "Rust culture" (although it's too vague to agree or disagree with, probably on purpose).

But in 2026, Rust is fully a commodity language, and especially to compare it to Zig in this angle is bizarre. Even turning my stereotypes to 11 and thinking back to when I worked with a team developing Rust professionally in 2021, I'd say we got mostly ended up hiring "proglang enthusiasts" and not "Rust people." In terms of "cultural dilution" alone Zig is orders of magnitude more culty than Rust because that many fewer people use it.

Jtsummers

28 minutes ago

> 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

10 minutes ago

> 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.

fwip

2 minutes ago

[delayed]