Hacker News: norman784

New comment by norman784 in "We moved Railway's frontend off Next.js. Builds went from 10+ mins to under 2"

norman784 — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 09:16:29 +0000

I don't know the situation now, but a while ago there were a lot of pushback using Next.js because it was not easy to use all features if not hosted on Vercel.

New comment by norman784 in "Zig – Type Resolution Redesign and Language Changes"

norman784 — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 09:07:49 +0000

I don't use Zig (is not a language for me), but I like to read/watch about it, when you or others talk about the language design and the reasons behind the changes.

Thanks for your and the Zig team work.

New comment by norman784 in "Type resolution redesign, with language changes to taste"

norman784 — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 08:57:54 +0000

I can think a few reasons:

- Cranelift applies less optimizations in exchange for faster compilation times, because it was developed to compile WASM (wasmtime), but turns out that is good enough for Rust debug builds.

- Cranelift does not support the wide range of platforms (AFAIK just X86_64 and some ARM targets)

New comment by norman784 in "The engine of Germany's wealth is blocking its future"

norman784 — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 15:54:53 +0000

For that you also need to reduce the bureaucracy.

New comment by norman784 in "Against Query Based Compilers"

norman784 — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 10:17:22 +0000

You need a fault tolerant parser, tree sitter is a good example on how it works in practice, your compiler should have the ability to run a few steps (parsing, symbol resolution, type checking, etc) with an incomplete/invalid AST.

> isn't it generally impossible to recovery syntactic errors

AFAIK Zig was designed in such way that, in most cases, you can parse each line independently, like their strings by default are single line, you need a special syntax for multiline strings that still are per line basis.

New comment by norman784 in "Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI"

norman784 — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 14:27:12 +0000

From the link it seems that Ladybird architecture is very modular, in this case LibJS is one of the subsystems that has less external dependencies, said that they don't need to migrate everything, only the parts that makes sense.

New comment by norman784 in "Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI"

norman784 — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 14:21:23 +0000

I guess you will need to wait for their Feb 2026 update.

New comment by norman784 in "Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI"

norman784 — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 14:16:17 +0000

Javascript is a self contained sub system, if the public API stays the same, then they can rewrite as much as they want, also I suppose this engine now will attract new contributors that will want to contribute to Ladybird just because they enjoy working with Rust.

Don't forget that the Rust ecosystem around browsers is growing, Firefox already uses it for their CSS engine[0], AFAIK Chrome JPEG XL implementation is written in Rust.

So I don't see how this could be seen as a negative move, I don't think sharing libraries in C++ is as easy as in Rust.

[0] https://github.com/servo/stylo

New comment by norman784 in "Minecraft Java is switching from OpenGL to Vulkan"

norman784 — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 06:39:09 +0000

TBH Mojang should have the resources to do that on his own, Minecraft is the best selling game of all times btw.

New comment by norman784 in "I'm building a clarity-first language (compiles to C++)"

norman784 — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 09:47:40 +0000

Most of what the section "Why ROX exists" reminds me of Rust and Zig, where both are more explicit (but Zig even more where there aren't hidden allocations, while Rust hides it).

Said that I really miss all the i{8|16|32|64|128|size}, u{8|16|32|64|128|size} and f{32|64} in other languages, I think having num and num32 is a mistake (IMHO) and naming like them like Rust/Zig provides more clarity (and it's also more concise).

For the "repeat" keyword I find it odd, because most other languages uses "for" but I can understand the reason and might be able to get used to it.

Otherwise I find always interesting new programming languages, what new they bring to the table and the lessons learned from other PLs.

New comment by norman784 in "Zig – io_uring and Grand Central Dispatch std.Io implementations landed"

norman784 — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 09:43:08 +0000

I have my doubts on Jai, besides being built towards game development, from what I read/watched about it, it has 2 or 3 meta programming capabilities, like comptime, macros, etc it feels too much of the same, also Jai is not built towards correctness or safety, John mentality is that he knows what he is doing, so he doesn’t need those guardrails and he wants instead expressiveness.

Also Jai is like C++ in complexity, while Zig is similar to C, very simple language.

Carbon is vaporware so far, there’s no language that could be used yet, because they first need to solve the C++ interop and fast compilation times, that is what will shape the language, so no one is using it, because it doesn’t exist yet.

New comment by norman784 in "The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling"

norman784 — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 21:09:32 +0000

But it should not be obnoxious, look at steam how is a small banner with two simple actions, vs all other cookie banners.

New comment by norman784 in "Zed editor switching graphics lib from blade to wgpu"

norman784 — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 17:53:24 +0000

The thing with GPUI is that the library itself is very low level and their scope is limited (by design I suppose), the ui with components is a separate crate with GPL license, while GPUI license is Apache.

As far GPUI has a great foundation, the community can built the components themselves.

New comment by norman784 in "Fedora Asahi Remix is now working on Apple M3"

norman784 — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 08:05:57 +0000

AFAIK they also were focusing on upstream the changes into the kernel [0], because the amount of downstream patches they were maintaining were making the work harder and harder.

[0] https://asahilinux.org/2025/10/progress-report-6-17/

New comment by norman784 in "Apple: You (Still) Don't Understand the Vision Pro"

norman784 — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 13:34:37 +0000

Agree, it would be awesome to move all your mac windows all over the place instead of being constrained in a virtual display. That would cut the amount of displays you need o have in order to be able to see more without switching between stacked windows, I will be tempted to buy one, if that were possible.

I have 3 displays and I am tempted to replace them with a single one, but bigger (with something like the Samsung Odyssey Ark).

New comment by norman784 in "Build Android apps using Rust and Iced"

norman784 — Mon, 22 Dec 2025 17:44:29 +0000

I hope that System76 invest into adding accessibility support into Iced, because they are using it to build Cosmic (the official desktop environment for Pop_OS).

New comment by norman784 in "Using e-ink tablet as monitor for Linux"

norman784 — Sun, 14 Dec 2025 11:59:51 +0000

This sounds like a good opportunity for a 3rd party e-ink screen for the framework laptops.

New comment by norman784 in "The Tor Project is switching to Rust"

norman784 — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 13:39:42 +0000

AFAIK if the project has a rust-toolchain.toml[0] file, cargo will download the correct compiler for the project.

[0] https://rust-lang.github.io/rustup/overrides.html#the-toolch...

New comment by norman784 in "The Tor Project is switching to Rust"

norman784 — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 13:37:00 +0000

Well, an underrated aspect of the Rust rewrites, is that it's easy to publish and share official libraries from the projects that the community can use, something that is too hard in C land.

New comment by norman784 in "GitLab discovers widespread NPM supply chain attack"

norman784 — Fri, 28 Nov 2025 08:16:59 +0000

You are not the target then, but people using Gitlab might find insightful.