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Cake day: June 6th, 2023

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  • They explain it a bit here: https://mitchellh.com/writing/ghostty-and-useful-zig-patterns

    Also, calling out the warning signs, my bar for a native platform experience is that the app feels and acts like a purpose-built native app. I don’t think this bar is unreasonable. For example, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say that Alacritty is kind of not native because new windows create new processes. Or that Kitty is kind of not native because tabs use a non-native widget. And so on (there are many more examples for each).

    So nothing wrong with Kitty on MacOS e.g., but the “feel” is not native. Personally don’t care too much about that, but the author seems to do.



  • This talk is technically not about Zig, but he still shows many of Zig’s strengts: https://youtu.be/aPWFLkHRIAQ?si=b-rf_oM*removed*IvAdq

    To me, Zig is a language that tries to be like C, but with all the decades of mistakes removed, or rather with modern knowledge of good language design in mind, while keeping as much compatibility as possible, as to not require a lot of work for the transition as Rust did. Thus, if you’re working in a C codebase, you’ll be good to go to integrate Zig in as little as an hour. They also have by far the cleanest solution to macros and generics that I have seen yet (although I miss my type classes).




  • Last time I tried NixOS, I tried to get some newer and lesser known wayland window managers to work. After like an hour of trying to get a custom session option into gdm, I had to give up. The nix package manager is fantastic, truly, but NixOS imho alters the way the system works way too much. Either it supports whatever you’re trying to do out of the box, then it’s very nice, or you’ll be in hell trying to map whatever explanations you find online to the clusterfuck that is NixOS’s altered file structure. You don’t simply add a .desktop file to the xsessions folder.

    Whatever solutions to problems like these you build in NixOS are always meant to be beautiful and reproducible, but building such solutions is a lot of work. For a window manager that I only wanted to try for a couple days, way too much work. For a system that I don’t intend to install on any other machine, probably not worth it.

    I.e. NixOS trades initial time invested with beauty and future time invested. A solution in NixOS is more beautiful, and much quicker to reproduce on another machine, but it takes way more time to set up the first time around (e.g. just doing it as opposed to writing a script that does it). As someone that does a lot of experimenting with new setups, NixOS was frustrating as hell. But for someone that needs to frequently install the same system on multiple machines, it’s a game changer no doubt.