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- Hacker News
- Zig is really nice. I enjoy using it a lot. Glad to hear that it is getting a little more funding.by osigurdson
- Mitchell Hashimoto, talk about putting your money where your mouth is. What a cool dude. Much respect!by Hasz
- I have been experimenting with modifying Ghostty lately. It's a well attended codebase and a pleasure to work with, props to Mitchell.
Since Ghostty is written in Zig, I ended up adding native Zig AST support in Dirac (https://github.com/dirac-run/dirac/blob/master/src/services/...)
One thing the has been a little unintuitive is the pattern of all code and tests in single files, which makes the filesizes grow much larger. Also if you're coming from inheritance supported languages, Zig forces a different way of thinking
- > I use AI heavily. I've written about my AI adoption journey and shipping real features with AI assistance. I'm also quite vocal about remaining rational about its capabilities and frustrated with its negative impacts on open source.
> The point is that I have opinions. Those opinions don't fully align with ZSF's approach. And yet, I have nothing but respect for ZSF: the people, the policies, and the project. Part of what makes the internet and open source great is that projects can be weird and different. They can set unusual boundaries, build their own culture, and pursue quality in ways that won't make sense to everyone.
Mitchell does feel like the adult in the room when other people are having chain-saws and acting irrationally for a lack of better term (for example jared/bun controversy which the post just somewhat touches on)
(Mitchell's tweet about AI psychosis is genuinely influential and is now a pointer to what this phenomenon might be)
I really think him and simon's opinions are somehow decently nuanced opinions on AI that the internet has to offer.
Now glazing of mitchell aside, I am happy that zig foundation gets such amount of money and I am really excited that Zig an independent language is able to get the level of love that it does.
There is a famous talk by the creator of Elm on the economics of independent programming languages and how its hard for them to get sponsored if they aren't already working at a company (Rust was created at Mozilla, Golang was created by Google)
This is a real issue that is true for most of open-source and I am just happy that we are atleast moving slowly towards some good as well. Its an uphill battle with multiple lows but I am happy for the positive changes as it gets as open source does have a special place in my heart as it taught me about privacy and many of your hearts as well.
- It's great to be in a position to do this, however I'm beginning to think that their greater contribution is ghostty
I don't really know how to value things any more when I see someone develop a tool that is kind-of useful that then gets acquired for half a billion dollars. As someone with a decent number of decades of terminal hopping, the improvement that ghostty has brought a breath of fresh air. To me it has represented more utility that a few of those acquisitions.
by Lerc - If you're unsure about spending the time to learn Zig, I really recommend watching the following interview with the creator of Zig https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqddnwKF8HQ convinced me more than any design doc or blogpost couldby nilsherzig
- I think it makes perfect sense for Zig to have their stand against LLM contributions while consumers of the compiler/Zig project overall use whatever code aids they like. Building a language is not a matter of churning out as much greenfield code as possible, but in careful consideration of whether or not some feature and its implementation fits coherently into the entire overall language. It's upstream of so much, and we now have decades and decades of examples where just letting rip with new additions renders a language schizoid and unergonomic. An LLM's tendency to "yes, of course, and," to any suggestion is not what a healthy language project needs, but it can be tremendously useful for someone employing a balanced and ergonomic language to generate products. I'm glad to see Mitchell keeping a cool head as the unfortunate tendency in so many devs to take sides and get dogmatic plays out yet again.
- What a word of wisdom right there, the bit about internet is beautiful because it's ok to be weird - this is often the opposite on twitter, fb, reddit and many discords where if you have a different opinion you get mobbed by angry comments making one feel worse about their own weirdness.by trizoza