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wmedranoon Interview with Mitchell Hashimoto about Ghostty and Zig

This is not surprising and perhaps one of the things I respect about it. Zig is pretty minimalist and I would prefer denying my pet features over becoming design by committee.

I'm a bit curious, what features could you not do without?

wmedranoon In Emacs, everything looks like a service

I think of Emacs as more of a lisp machine than text editor. I'm also not sure what an IDE has over Emacs. I have autocomplete, compiler checks, and run tests all within Emacs.

For general automation, my blog is built with Emacs Lisp.

wmedranoon The feature in OxCaml that more languages should steal

If you don't pass an allocator param in Zig, then the function basically can't allocate.

wmedranoon ZCode – Harness for GLM-5.2

I haven't tried Z.ai, but both Ollama ($20) and OpencodeGo ($10) seem to give me more generous limits than the Claude $20

wmedranoon CachyOS June 2026 Release

I'm surprised this is the default. How good are the snapshot management tools?

wmedranoon (How to Write a (Lisp) Interpreter (In Python)) (2010)

I thought parentheses were fairly intuitive. They are not for grouping, more like representing an AST.

For other languages, similarly, x is not the same as x()

wmedranoon (How to Write a (Lisp) Interpreter (In Python)) (2010)

I made a rusty version of this. No linked lists, but that's not important in the grand Scheme of things.

https://wmedrano.dev/post/2025/11/15/lisp-1

wmedranoon Emacs 31 is around the corner: The changes I'm daily driving

haha, I definitely wouldn't call my setup fast. But it did get a lot better after Native Compilation and a lot of the major stuff has started async to feel more responsive at least.

wmedranoon Ask HN: Has anyone replaced Claude/GPT with a local model for daily coding?

No, but I use GLM5.1 instead of Claude/GPT.

wmedranoon Ask HN: What are you working on? (June 2026)

I just started Compiling with Continuations by Andrew W. Appel.

I hope that by the end of the book I don't find out that CPS compiled code produces bad stack traces.

wmedranoon GLM 5.2 Is Out

Which specific models were you using?

In March I switched to Opencode + Kimi K2.5 and found it was a step behind. I switched to GLM 5.1 and has felt like a step above. Its probably some combination of me forgetting the baseline, model improvements, and OpenCode improvements.

$20 a month has been good enough for my coding use cases. I wouldn't call myself a vibe coder. Stuff I do is create graphs/visualizations, review, polish code, generate toy examples for learning.

wmedranoon Swift at Apple: Migrating the TrueType hinting interpreter

I've been fine with Linux/KDE. Even the fractional scaling support is decent.

Edit: Guess it depends on the app

wmedranoon Kimi K2.7-Code: open-source coding model with better token efficiency

> Trump cannot instruct Google to put picture of dogs on their homepage.

I'm sorry, but that was a horrible example. Corporations have no obligation to donate money to the ballroom yet Google has donated millions.

wmedranoon Show HN: Boxes.dev: ditch localhost; run Claude Code and Codex in the cloud

Well, I wouldn't use this since I have my own box. In case its useful:

- I run hermes on the box and it has some scheduled cron jobs.

- I gave it an account on a custom Git forge. It cannot commit without my direct permission, though it can blow the setup up in other ways lol.

- I interact by assigning it issues and talking through Discord.

wmedranoon Why Janet? (2023)

I started writing a Scheme interpreter about a year ago and got pretty far. I dropped it a few months back since I got a new job.

I'm thinking of getting back and am wondering if the niche (and difficult for me to implement) features are worth it. I might be better off skipping dynamic-unwind, maybe even ripping out call/cc, in favor working on the debugability, ecosystem, performance, and package management story.

wmedranoon Why Janet? (2023)

Ironically, the top comment (this) is now about AI.

wmedranoon Zig: Build System Reworked

Zig gives you more control than Rust, which should theoretically lead to a higher performance ceiling.

There's not much magic in Zig. Keep hitting goto-definition and you can eventually see the OS switch statements and syscalls.

wmedranoon Zig: Build System Reworked

Try it if you want full control over every memory and IO operation and "drop". If you hit "goto-definition", you eventually get to see the OS switch statements and syscalls. There's not much magic.

Do not try it if you are scared of memory management and memory leaks.

wmedranoon Is AI Profitable Yet?

We're talking about ~1 trillion $$$ valuations here tho

wmedranoon A History of IDEs at Google

When I joined in 2016, it CitC would make it look (and still does) like you had the entire monorepo on your local filesystem on your machine.

Git5 would copy some directories but builds would still fallback to files from the monorepo if you didn't track them. It was convenient for me since I could just grep and do fuzzy matching from my editor. Now I have to do some extra work to avoid grepping the entire monorepo. LLMs sometimes still try to grep the entire repo lol.

Now, you could use a perforace, mercurial, or jj interface and it works fine.

wmedranoon A History of IDEs at Google

From the user interface perspective though, it does essentially look like you've pulled all of google3 into your disk.

wmedranoon A History of IDEs at Google

Luckily, they still support the text editor + CLI tools workflow so I can still use Emacs effectively.

wmedranoon A History of IDEs at Google

We've moved on from Git5. Although it was a pain, I kind of liked that Git5 made the monorepo less monolithic to my editor.

wmedranoon A History of IDEs at Google

Yeah, under my desk. I rarely remote which is a good excuse for me to disconnect from work anyways.

wmedranoon A History of IDEs at Google

I use a workstation specifically to improve latency. Needed to get approval at some point to get a refresh though.

wmedranoon StarFighter 16-Inch

I tried going from a budget Lenovo Linux to a Macbook Pro after graduating from university. The hardware was solid, but it is probably my most disappointing purchase.

Right now, I'm extremely satisfied with my workhorse Linux desktop and less so satisfied with my Linux laptop battery life, but I mostly use desktop anyways.

wmedranoon Zed editor switching graphics lib from blade to wgpu

Do you have a screenshot? I just tried Zed out on Linux and biggest issue was that it assumed an rgb subpixel layout.

- https://pasteboard.co/ZDnQm80dHANx.png

- Top is wezterm which is correct.

- Bottom is Zed which uses rgb.

- Both are using Inconsolata though wezterm claims size is 16 and Zed is at 18. I don't have any screen scaling.

*edit formatting

wmedranoon Ask HN: Share your personal website

https://wmedrano.dev

I'll write more this year, I promise

wmedranoon A brief history of Times New Roman

I'm too dumb as well. I flipped this to make it about text editors. Personally, I love my Emacs:

This, like almost all writing about fonts, is bewildering to me. It just doesn't matter. For me, there are just 3 text editors in the world: IDE's, terminal editors, and weird editors (Ed, Teco, etc.)

What's even more strange is reading strong opinions on how great Emacs is, or how terrible NeoVim is ("Gnu good Apache bad", I know.) They're the same thing! I guess I'm too dumb to notice the subtle differences between Lisp and Lua.