Interview with Mitchell Hashimoto about Ghostty and Zig
Points and comments are a snapshot, not live.
Mitchell Hashimoto explains his design philosophy for Ghostty and his views on Zig.
Mitchell Hashimoto discusses his motivations for building Ghostty: to sharpen technical skills in GPU programming, desktop systems, and Zig after 15 years of CLI work. He critiques the terminal ecosystem's lack of a standards body and proposes an "n-screen" API and a button protocol to improve terminal applications. He distinguishes open source software from a product, stating maintainers have no obligation to users, and advocates for more forks. Hashimoto praises Zig's ongoing development and notes AI can reduce the pain of backwards-incompatible changes.
What commenters are saying
The comment thread centers on a disagreement about programming language cultures. One top commenter notes disliking Zig's community, describing anti-Rust rhetoric and a lack of engagement with their practical requirements, which they found off-putting. Another commenter counters by saying Rust's community can also be dogmatic and dismissive of other languages. Some commenters defend Ghostty's quality and features against criticism it is buggier than iTerm2, while others find Ghostty the best terminal they have used. A few commenters defend HashiCorp tools as significant innovations.