Talk: Introducing Ghostty and Some Useful Zig Patterns

This isn't a release announcement. Ghostty 1.0 is out. You can download it and read about it on the Ghostty website. This is a personal reflection on the project.

After nearly two years of development and private beta testing1, I’m excited to share that Ghostty 1.0 will be publicly released in December 2024 as an open-source project under the MIT license.

My wife and I have pledged $300,0001 to the Zig Software Foundation (ZSF).

Zig supports tagged unions1 and the Zig compiler will error if you switch on a tagged union without handling all possible cases. This is a great feature because it helps you avoid bugs when new cases are added to the union. Many languages support similar functionality.

Zig has a very powerful feature called comptime. Comptime lets you run Zig code at compile time. This isn't a special macro language or AST manipulation; it is just standard Zig code that runs at compile time. The only real limitation is that comptime code can't have side effects (no syscalls, no IO, etc.).