Zig Brings Joy to Ghostty Dev | Generated by AI
Question: Why does the Ghostty author like Zig lang?
Answer:
The author of Ghostty, Mitchell Hashimoto (co-founder of HashiCorp), has repeatedly explained that he chose and enjoys Zig primarily because it is genuinely fun to work with, and this personal enjoyment has remained strong even after years of development.
Here are the main reasons he likes Zig, based on his own statements across talks, blog posts, and interviews:
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Fun and joy in daily coding — He has described Zig as “an absolute joy to work with” and says he has fun writing Zig code every single day, with that feeling not diminishing over more than two years of building Ghostty.
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He personally likes the language, community, and build system — In his Zig Showtime talk introducing Ghostty, he said: “Simply put: I like the community, language, and build system.” He feels Zig’s features and build system are especially well-suited for a complex project like a terminal emulator.
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Contrast with other languages — While acknowledging that Rust is great, he has noted that Rust is “not that fun” for him personally (in comparison). Zig gives him higher morale and enjoyment, which matters a lot for a long-term solo/passion project.
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Practical advantages for the project — Zig enables a clean, high-performance core (libghostty) that can be shared across platforms, compiles to native code, interoperates well with C APIs (GTK on Linux), and keeps the codebase approachable for contributors despite being a newer language.
Ghostty started in 2022 purely as a personal playground to experiment with Zig, learn graphics programming, and understand terminals better — it wasn’t originally meant to be released. The sustained enjoyment of using Zig is what helped turn it into a serious, high-quality terminal emulator that reached 1.0 and gained popularity.
In short: the biggest reason is subjective enjoyment — Zig simply makes coding feel pleasurable for him, which is a powerful motivator for independent, multi-year projects.
References:
- https://mitchellh.com/writing/ghostty-1-0-reflection
- https://mitchellh.com/writing/ghostty-and-useful-zig-patterns
- https://ghostty.org/docs/about
- https://leapcell.medium.com/some-fun-facts-about-ghostty-0baa34a345ae