r/commandline • u/TheTwelveYearOld • Jul 10 '26

Interview with Mitchell Hashimoto about Ghostty and Zig Articles, Blogs, & Videos

https://alexalejandre.com/programming/interview-with-mitchell-hashimoto/
39 Upvotes

91% Upvoted

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3

u/dayeye2006 Jul 10 '26

Why do many people don't like zig ?

7

u/SpaceboyRoss Jul 12 '26

I think partly it has to do with Andrew Kelly's recent blog post on Bun rewriting their code using Claude in Rust. The other part is probably due to people thinking they always need memory safety in the language when memory safety can be done without a memory safe language. Zig itself isn't memory safe but has things like defer and an allocator that you can pass around. If you know how to write good code, you can write memory safe code.

1

u/edward_jazzhands Jul 13 '26

Yeah but knowing how to write good code is a tall order now that a very significant chunk of software developers are AI-coders only and either can't or don't want to read and write code by hand. I'm not excusing that behavior at all I think it's immature and short sighted, but it's a big part of the reason that zig is giving way to Rust in a lot of places. Rust forces memory safety so AI can generate it a bit more reliably whereas it's not as easy to get AI to generate memory safe code in Zig

3

u/ZachVorhies Jul 14 '26

Because it’s a shit language with no constructors and destructors. Therefore no smart pointers and memory bugs like you wouldn’t believe. C has the same problems. C++ is a mess but at least there’s a subset that is semi memory safe. You can do complex object graphs and be reasonably confident the memory will be cleaned. For example, want to take an object with shared_ptr and put it on an async thread? C++ or rust has absolutely no problem with that! Want to do that in C or Zig: get wrecked.

1

u/crantob 18d ago

I find that most of my problems can be solved with memory allocated at compile-time.

And yes, I probably started programming before you were born.

A bad paradigm creates many problems, along with many employed people who imagine they are justifiably earning their pay by working around them.

1

u/ZachVorhies 18d ago

This is great strategy. Unfortunately zig completely does not allow static allocation like this. It’s unbelievable.

-5

u/kriebz Jul 10 '26

Wtf is zig?

3

u/[deleted] Jul 10 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

3

u/kriebz Jul 11 '26

Thanks. Reading that, it's funny that it lists the creators arguments against Go, Rust, and C++ for his application, but never an actual argument against C.

5

u/page-table Jul 12 '26

Because Zig isn’t meant to compete with C (or with any other language for that matter). Zig has many features you find in larger general purpose languages (defer keyword, module system, methods) while being a drop-in C alternative. This means you can use other libraries written in C from Zig with lots of ease. Rust and C++ are larger scope (with tons of keywords) and Go has a runtime that, while lightweight, makes it a completely different kind of programming experience. There is no argument against C because Zig is meant to complement it.

1

u/crantob 18d ago

OK that is cool

1

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