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Comment by rnestler | Hacker News Reader

There was a blog post with some benchmarks in 2018: https://jwilm.io/blog/alacritty-lands-scrollback/ But not sure if this is still applicable.

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Some other benchmarks show it as slower, particularly with respect to latency (where I agree with the people who say this is the most important metric: "throughout" has only really ever mattered to me in extreme cases, such as with mintty, which slowly renders all intermediate states); this was brought up in a Hacker News discussion of this link you just posted, and has been discussed elsewhere, such as reddit.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18006751

https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/8ffddi/alacrittys_not...

The whole "Alacritty is the fastest terminal emulator in existence" just frankly just comes off as dishonest marketing BS given that people even elsewhere here on this thread keep reporting jank issues :/, and it kind of gives the Rust community in general a "bad look" since a lot of projects also claim they are "blazing fast" and it makes you wonder "are you really checking that? are you measuring the right thing?".

My comment about rust and 'blazingly fast' is a bit offhand, but my point is just because it's native, doesn't mean it's fast. People can, and do, write crappy slow code in any language.

C++ projects (or D, Zig, Nim, Swift, or your native language of choice) don't sell themselves as 'blazingly fast' every single time but all, in principle, produce fast native code.

If the competition was written in say Ruby or TCL they might have had a point in touting the language used as a performance enhancer.

But all terminals people care about are already C/C++ -- Rust doesn't have that much (if any) speed advantage there...

It's all down to algorithms used... It's not like terminal code will take benefit from e.g. memory aliasing related optimizations...

There are a ton of terminal emulators out there based on HTML5, CSS, and Javascript, little Chromium apps and similar. And on some platforms they're often the only ones offering certain features or extensibility.

And they're naturally much slower than Alacritty and any normal Linux terminal emulator.

>There are a ton of terminal emulators out there based on HTML5, CSS, and Javascript, little Chromium apps and similar.

Just not those people really care about -- except maybe the one in VSCode.

And of course, they are not those that Alacritty competes with and alludes to being faster to.

"Faster than HTML5-based terminals!!!" would be a pretty low bar, if not embarrasing as a motto...

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