No mobile version, but I'm visiting from a tablet, should work at least if switch to "Desktop" in the browser manually. I don't care if I get horizontal scroll - not showing your visitors anything at all is an automatic "I'm out".
Second, when I browsed from an actual desktop, and clicked on links for files it was all slow as hell - specifically the part when you click on a file an expect it to just load, you instead get: 1) some layout switch which looks like page reload 2) then it says "loading..." for several seconds.
After looking at the source code, it appears to be React or similar frontend framework... Ugh. I don't know why people choose to use that stuff, just have a regular SSR which would work a hundred times faster and is more pleasant. And if you really want an SPA, don't use React, Vue or Svelte (and similar), it's horrible and always slow.
Finally, since this appears to be a YC company, it shouldn't matter what's it written in. In fact, I don't even know why Rust would be a good thing here when Go or even Rails/Django would work just fine - but again, it just reinforces the meme that if it's written in Rust, you'll surely hear about it.
Overall, the minimalism idea is welcomed, but it supposedly should appeal to people like myself and it doesn't for all the reasons I mentioned above.
I have to agree with the proposition that if you are aiming for the performant, no frills deal - and the aesthetic certainly telegraphs this - you really do not need client-side render, nor overengineered frontend frameworks like React & friends. Ditto for Styled Components (looks like you're not using the latter).
The look only seems minimal as well. I need to zoom in to read, which eventually destroys the layout. A minimal website has at least basic accessibility by default, this uses some kind of "modern" styling stuff to ruin it.
absolutely this, and I feel the same way about finding it unappealing due to the inconsistency between their "talk" and their "walk". If you preach minimalism but use React or anything similar, you've lost the plot and don't understand what minimalism is at all.
> In fact, I don't even know why Rust would be a good thing here when Go or even Rails/Django would work just fine
FWIW I've noticed that agents are pretty good at writing "High-Level Rust" for most basic applications, which gives you pretty great performance (orders of magnitude faster than RoR), great deployment, probably great security if steered by a senior, and pretty great maintenance again if originally steered by a senior. I feel like this is a not-so-secret secret.
I personally won't be using dynamic languages for anything but toy scripts now. (well, except JS, which is hard to avoid with the massive size of WASM bundles)
P.S. I assume Go is still great as well, but IMO Go no longer has an identity. What are they going for anyways? Garbage collected rust? "How to invent a perfect niche and then throw it all away in 21 days". /rant
Identity? Most folks don't think that way anymore. I try to funnel them from Python to GO. I want to ship binaries. I want them to think about dependencies and if they really need them.
I am not a rust evangelist, I am not a rust programmer or programmer at all;
however while evaluating tools to use, anything written in Rust and Go at-least gets me to look at the project in more detail, since they most likely are able to ship statically linked binaries, which has been one of the key criteria for my personal evaluation of tools to select and use.
So, you might not consider it as a valid signal, however it might be for other users. Even if it has a negative connotation for you. Which in itself, again might be a good filter in case you don’t want to use it.
Clickbait (also known as link bait or linkbait) is a text or a thumbnail link that is designed to attract attention and to entice users to follow ("click") that link and view, read, stream or listen to the linked piece of online content, being typically deceptive, sensationalized, or otherwise misleading.
- Rust is huge, many options, many programming styles
- typical Rust project has lots of transitive dependencies
- there is nothing in Rust that disallows using system libraries or linking to them
- it's not even true that the program is going to be mem-safe because there could still be unsafe {} either in the repo, or in any of the transitive deps. not to say that safety is broader than just mem-safety.
if you think "written in Rust" says anything, I'd argue that you might give it a try and find out yourself. I did that, and I am glad I am out. the reason why I am telling you is because I've been click-baited (into Rust) before, and it took me few years to realize all of this, and to make a move.
You can write any program in any language, but there are definitely benefits of using some languages for some programs. If you disagree with this statement, there's nothing else to discuss, we have irreconcilable differences.
You just responded to a comment giving a specific advantage that applies to Rust and a few other languages which doesn't apply to a large amount of other languages (single static binary).
How can you still not see any advantage? Or was the point of your comment to say that you think the only real motivation is self or Rust promotion, suggesting some dishonesty amongst the people you're responding to?
Sure, but we're talking about a git web UI with a little icing, not a git replacement (at least in most cases). Even so, Rust and Go web projects are much more lighterweight than projects in most other languages, with drastically less effort towards performance, and use less resources as a result, requiring less hardware to operate.
How is statically linked binaries an unique advantage of rust or go? you can do the same with C, C++, pascal, ada, zig, and more. Rust even doesnt do the static binary file by default.
You might have better devops experience as an end-user of the said software if its statically linked and its a good trend in software sure but it is not unique to go or rust.
Admitting you don't know how to code and still trying to argue rust is better is just wild sorry.
Zig and probably Pascal have the same advantage, can't speak for Ada as I've never built it.
C and C++? You've got to be joking. If the project provides static binaries, sure, but I don't want to have to worry about finding a necronomicon and summoning the correct kind of imp required to properly use whatever insane build system the project is using.
And thus, we all agree that Linux, Windows, and OS X are all bad software, because they're written in C and C++ and have insanely complicated build systems.
You are missing the point here. Single binary files are not what makes a programming language good or bad.
Its like saying "I want a red car because it goes fast" when people are actually disucssing how the engine works or how easy/difficult is it to drive etc.
You cannot base your like/dislike on that single criteria and expect that to actually make sense.
For some people, Linux package management is not solved. Static binaries at least work for deployment.
More useful for client software, but you can’t just dismiss someone for having this preference given the poor viability of running arbitrary binaries on Linux due to GNU’s userland style.
No, it does not depend. Your parent is correct with his analogy.
Linux package management is solved, if it depends on something, it depends on the specific Linux distribution, but "Linux" package management is definitely solved.
Off: I thought I am becoming dumb, but this really puts me in a new perspective. The odd thing is that even people who work in IT hold similar beliefs. I am not entirely sure what is going on. Favoring a language so blindly seems like a thing, apparently? For example they seem to have convinced themselves that Rust is "safe" if you use it for anything (without implementing the security features) because it is (memory) safe? I did not imagine beginners would make such a mistake either, but alas.
I noticed your comment is getting downvoted. I wish I knew why though. Is it because of your analogy? Is it because they think that somehow "single binary" has anything to do with the programming language? Would like to know. I am not going to assume that it is a confirmation of what I wrote earlier.
There's a pretty strong culture of "no static linking because I need to replace the .so to preserve my freedom hurr durr" in a lot of Linux spaces, so quite a few of these C/C++ FOSS libraries are a pain in the ass to statically link.
Literally last week I was porting something to Linux and had to rewrite the libwayland build scripts because they only expose a shared object.
There's also an expectation that you're going to install them via your system's package manager, not build them, so a lot of them use insane build systems (autotools, meson).
You are right that there are many of us who prefer the package manager, there are so many reasons why a package manager makes your life wonderful. Debian has always been a proponent of dynamic linking. When you create a Linux distribution that is a big plus.
For me install size matters and statically linked stuff are too big sometimes. Of course a 100MB go statically compiled binary has huge advantages now days.
If the binary still depends on libc.so.6 (glibc) at runtime, then it is not a fully static binary (read: not a static binary). It is a dynamically linked executable, albeit one where most non-libc dependencies have been statically linked.
I am not going to pretend I know Rust enough to comment (yes, would be a minute check), I was just commenting on the "Only libc is dynamically linked" bit.
That's the default. One can also statically bind that libc.so.6 quite easily. Though that's not the default.
edit: Ironically, that makes shipping the binary a tad harder, since this "linux" version won't "magically" run on about every Linux, or mac version on mac, etc. I guess that's why its not the default, though that's just me guessing.
It is not about being able to make static binaries or really anything that has to do with anything technical. It is more of a cultural thing - the culture in some languages is to link dependencies dynamically (C/C++) whereas the culture in others is to link dependencies statically (Go, not sure about Rust).
Personally i do not even write Go myself yet when i see some webapp made in Go i'm pretty much always sure that it'll be a self-contained static binary. Yes, there are probably exceptions (and i haven't surveyed all webapps made with Go) but it has been common enough to feel as the standard approach to me - and if i ever decide to make a binary webapp, i'll probably reach for Go to do it.
But the "Written in rust" stuff comes with so much falsehood baggage about automatic best-in-class performance, automatic perfect safety, automatic rigor, that it is detrimental to just say "written in rust" and not provide a more nuanced statement about why that's good (or just drop it as a headline item!). You might not agree because you can single out one automatic benefit of rust b/c of Cargo (not rust), but even that is suspect b/c Rust can ship with dynamic libraries if configured to do so.
In this case, the credibility and benefits are clearer if they said "Static binary". This is all just context. If you see a benefit to that headline, that's ok.
Was going to point that out, as it is irrelevant, but I have seen something far worse.
> 7. How does gitdot make money?
> We don't.
> We are fortunate enough to have raised a small pre-seed round from investors we are happy to call friends, and also to be at a point in our lives where we are financially independent and in good health.
The founders of Artifact said the same thing. They had no plan to make money and once they used their own capital they decided not to continue running it anymore (no-one else wanted to invest in Artifact).
So it is only a matter of time until they eventually need to make money, raise money or shut it down.
I suspect the fact that Github and Gitlab use ruby backends is a significant (although by no means the only) factor in the slowness of Github and Gitlab. So yes, being written in a language that is better suited for high performance at scale is, potentially, an advantage. Although if it is vibe coded, there's a decent chance there are architectural problems that offset the advantage gained from the choice in language.
Not literally. And I would hardly say it was a matter of language superiority. I love Ruby myself. But Github was a lot simpler when it was still just a Rails app.
But Rails was SSR by default, and most of the frontend was just Embedded Ruby (ERB) template files all over the place. And way back when, it was even relatively common to use Javascript supersets like CoffeeScript[1] and Opal[2]. The latter being Ruby that compiled to JS.
Yes, standard rails. Rails does not ship with components out of the box and the most prominent component system for rails was built and is maintained by GitHub. They have been moving to React for the last few years though, it seems to be more about hiring and ergonomics rather than capability.
Reports of Ruby slowness are often exaggerated. Around the time GH was built that was certainly true, but in the ways that matter Ruby is more than fast enough nowadays, even at scale. (Shopify is a rails monolith, as is intercom and a bunch of other massive services) Compute is/was pretty cheap and the economics of ROR mean that it's ultimately not that expensive to run. I think GH's slowness is a mixture of mismanagement and issues on the frontend.
But for sure a systems language is going to be far faster on paper and Rails is far from perfect and does have some performance foot guns you need to avoid. And yeah, architecture is everything.
Yeah, rust programmers are the new software vegans.
They claim it is better just because of the language, ignoring the features gap, the size of the team developing and supporting the software and not having solved any issue with the software they compete against.
And to be clear, this in not in favour of GH, it is against the mentality that the programming language makes better products and programmers.
I was very excited about Rust prior to the LLM-era. I never managed to dive deep into it due to the lack of time, but was really planning to.
Nowadays when everyone and their dog are either vibe-coding with Rust or constantly shouting about it's superiority, I've lost any interest in the language. I'm learning Zig.
Feel the same way about the intersection of Rust evangelists and vibe coders. The amount of undeserved arrogance by some hardcore believers is toxic to their culture. I am learning Rust, because there is merit to the language itself, and there are some useful and quality codebases written in it. But it's imperfect in various ways, most of all the evangelists attacking other languages as inferior and unsafe, and the increasingly common massive vibe-coded monstrosities. It's not that I'm against the use of LLMs, I'm against bad engineering practices and unmaintainable code.
Zig, on the other hand, is a breath of fresh air. There's so much to love about it, including language design that values clarity and simplicity, and the cross-compiler which is how I got started on it, by using Zig as a better build system for C projects. Their move away from GitHub and vibe-coded contributions is also commendable, it's more reason I trust their sensible judgement.
Interesting choice when LLMs remove one of the biggest barriers to entry for Rust which is you have to know almost all the rules to reliably make valid changes to Rust programs (which also helps LLMs at inference time when they make mistakes).
It's not about if the entire community is weird. But that a few vocal people doing something becomes the first impression of the ecosystem. Which is turning people off from exploring further, as you can see in this thread.
You can make the case that if something like this turns you off from diving deeper into the language you probably weren't that motivated to begin with. But it is a noticable effect. This post isn't the first time I see it either. Rust has become a meme amongst my colleagues because things keep popping up with "Build with Rust" before mentioning anything of substance of the project. The phrase "Did you know Rust is memory safe?" is also a running joke in my IRL dev surroundings now.
I mean, yeah... but I bet if Zig gets really popular, it will attract similarly toxic weirdoes.
Also if we're only judging whole communities by their toxic minorities, then... I'm so sorry Americans reading this, I've got some bad news for you, lol
What I'm trying to say is, it's best to try <a thing> for yourself, and see if it fits your preferences, rather than letting others stop you from exploring.
> What I'm trying to say is, it's best to try <a thing> for yourself, and see if it fits your preferences, rather than letting others stop you from exploring.
Yes, that is the rational thing to do. I don't think anybody disagrees with that. But that's not how a lot of people go throughout their day. There are a gazillion languages to pick up nowadays, and I think many experienced devs only have a casual interest in picking up a new one. If you've been interested in picking up a system language, I can easily see why you would steer away from Rust towards Zig.
And just to clarify here. You shouldn't judge an entire community based on their toxic minority. But as a community, you can't also ignore your toxic minority. Like it or not, they do represent you. And they do scare away potential newcomers who aren't already sold on the language.
I have seen developers and managers having an attitude of arrogance just because they happen to code in a specific language. They also look down upon other developers just because they happen to code in some other language. Evangelism combined with arrogance is toxic.
Reminds me of a colleague who rewrote the entire standard template library from scratch to demonstrate his uber-templating knowledge. He was the only one who could debug problems in that. The rest of us were ordinary c++ coders.
I've always found juniors to be the most prone to being "clever". Writing complex things for the sake of it. And it's one of the things I think you need to get over if you want to be considered medior/senior. A senior that loves being clever in an actual product is dangerous. Keep that stuff for hobby projects.
At a web agency I used to work at this was definitely a thing we had to teach the juniors. Whatever you built now is going to end up in maintenance with a support team that doesn't have as deep of an understanding of the project. Being overly clever now is going to be a pain in the ass later.
"Keep It Simple, Stupid" is an important skill for a professional.
> We adopted Rust for its security and are seeing a 1000x reduction in memory safety vulnerability density compared to Android’s C and C++ code. But the biggest surprise was Rust's impact on software delivery. With Rust changes having a 4x lower rollback rate and spending 25% less time in code review, the safer path is now also the faster one.
Bugs are not only related to memory and a program cannot be considered safe Just because it got rid of pointers, malloc and free.
If you really think that switching language is the main driver to get safe programs, the you are on the list of people replaceable by LLMs.
Othewise you have to understand that architettural chioces, concurrency, (weak) cryptographic function and user stupidity have a significant impact, no matter what language you use. Memory management is just a part of the problem.
> If you really think that switching language is the main driver to get safe programs [...]
I didn't write that.
> [...] the you are on the list of people replaceable by LLMs.
lol, love a high quality discussion
> Memory management is just a part of the problem.
Sure, then using Rust is a step forward, because that's one less thing you have to worry about. Seat belts don't save all people, but a car equipped with seat belts is - on average - safer than a car without seat belts.
It would be nice if they mentioned anyhting at all they are doing to implement security features. instead of leaning onf Rust which does absolutely nothing in that regard. just look owasp top 10 and observe it has nothing to do with memory safety. and thats just a top 10 of things.
only for very few companies, memory safety issues are a thing. most of those dont use rust because it lacks tooling and certification paths -_-.
rust is like AI and cloud. heavily marketed, not bad, but not as good as whats on the box -_-. it makes life usually harder for a lot of aspects (ofc cleverly avoid in publications about it -_-)
Yeah, this is what the people who have parroted "Rust is safe" have achieved. Rust is not "safe" in the broader sense of the word, only "memory safe". You have to implement the security yourself!
You assume that its used to show advantage, but we are on a technical forum and for me, as an engineer, its always interesting what language or tech was used to create a project.
Fast, Safe, Lightweight, Statically linked (plop a precompiled binary in ~/.local/bin and run it), few/shallow dependencies, senior developers, "Done" software.
Now, certainly no guarantees, enough counter-examples, I know. And attributes that one can get with anything from PHP via Javascript to Lisp as well. Some attributes have stronger correlation than others too.
But, in general, "rust" has a (much) higher chance of meeting these attributes. I care about those attributes above anything else.
is just flat-out wrong. There's (sadly) a big culture of sprawling, deep dependencies in the Rust community. There are of course many counterexamples too, but it's definitely not correct that Rust signals the virtue you refer to.
(Incidentally, the misguided idea among some that as long as a dependency isn't through FFI, it doesn't count as a dependency, is one of the things I dislike the most about Rust culture. That, and pervasive bundling.)
> the misguided idea among some that as long as a dependency isn't through FFI, it doesn't count as a dependency, is one of the things I dislike the most about Rust culture
I have not heard that idea a single time. There's definitely the idea that FFI dependencies "count more" / add more baggage (because there's a bigger risk that the build fails, it's harder to investigate memory safety, ...). Absolutely not that a non-FFI dependency "does not count".
Probably my reference is tainting this then. I come from Perl, PHP (both of which, at that time, had nonexisting or terrible package managing - CPAN, PEAR), then Ruby, with gems and now Python, Typescript/Javascript. Starting with Ruby, I've developed in communities that heavily depend on deep dependency trees.
For me, the discipline of shallow dependencies, no-dependencies etc, was new when I came to rust.
Sure, if I pull in something like Rocket, it comes with dependencies, that have dependencies that have dependencies. But Rocket is one of the more extreme examples I know of, and even that is nowhere near the depth of a tree that common (not extreme) npm frameworks/libraries come with. Before yarn I sometimes had node-module trees that went over 50 levels deep.
The Python community doesn't have this extreme deep dependencies, but in Python it is far more common to "from foo import bar" in both libraries and in applications than to write a few hundred lines of code yourself. The Django and "lean" flask, or "simple" cli apps I worked with and on, quite commonly have hundreds of dependencies (many of which are dependencies of dependencies etc).
Within that context, rust community is far more conservative. Many of the dependencies that I use have one, maybe two of their own deps. Many none. And it's more common - IME - to see libraries that have just one level of deps - the libs a lib depends on, itself won't have deps.
Though, I guess, C or even C++ community, lacking OOTB, common and easy dependency management like cargo, will be far more conservative even.
Rather than being "flat out wrong", I'd say it very much depends (pun intended) on where you come from and compare rust with.
Oh stop being silly. Yes, the programming language is technically irrelevant in that they’re all Turing complete.
In reality, the programming language tells you all kinds of subtle things: probabilities about the way the software will feel to use, how stable it’s likely to be, how fast, what the author is likely to focus on.
I found one of the best jobs of my life in 2015 by asking “who’s doing interesting things in Atlanta in Go?” Not because I was uncompromisingly settled on Go, but because in 2015, using Go (often) connoted a certain approach, a certain type of engineering, a certain constellation of values.
So please stop pretending the whole gestalt of programming languages and their communities don’t deeply affect the resulting software.
(I say this with no unkindness intended, mostly to all of hackernews)
> but because in 2015, using Go (often) connoted a certain approach, a certain type of engineering, a certain constellation of values
So called "The vibe". And the vibe emanating from Rust is sometimes unbearable. Like claiming the main feature of the project is that it's written in Rust.
It’s one of the first questions people will ask so it’s probably worthwhile to mention it. I didn’t get the impression they did so just because they thought rust was some kind of flex.
If the first thing people ask about your offering is "what programming language did you use when you made this," your offering is probably not that interesting.
If your primary audience is people who want to contribute to it, then the fun of hacking on it is more impactful than the benefit of the offering itself. That's not bad at all! But it also does not suggest that the offering itself is particularly impactful.
This drives me nuts too and your comment is justified.
Recently encountered someone going 'full crab' with rust & vk trying to chase perf, they were not happy when some thoughtfully written modern JS beat the brakes off it even with the overhead of the browser (~2000fps vs 750)
This kind of thoughtless "its rust!!!" shit causes people who don't know better to waste time chasing their tails. Claude seems to encourage it :\
/s, I love zig, but I'm consistently surprised of how popular any post containing zig in the title makes it to the front page almost daily, doesn't happen with any other language.
I agree that such a claim is a stretch, however, I personally love the minimalist look (it has its own charm). Saying it 'looks like the stylesheets failed to load' is your own exaggeration.
Interesting stuff! I really like the design philosophy you're applying here, where the browser/web behaviour is actually part of the UX. Pretty rare for web application nowadays!
If I could make one suggestion, I really like the old MacOS "inspector" pattern. Basically a consistent way to get meta-information about any "thing" the user chooses to inspect. Your right sidebar is going towards that, but it would need some work to make it more consistent between views.
GitHub's UI has these weird meta-states/restrictions that are so badly explained in the UI they feel like bugs. Each line gets a [...] menu in github which lets you see the blame/spawn a issue linking to it/get a permalink/etc. It's a totally different UI in the diff view, and then totally different again if you're looking at a comment referencing a line in a diff AND different if it's referencing a permalink to a line in a file, even if it's the same code that would be in that diff!
I want the UI to have obvious "nouns". If the UI is showing me a line of code, even if it's in a diff view, let me "inspect" it and get the exact same meta-info + tools I get for lines of code anywhere. It's "a line", not a weird meta state of "a line, but you're in the comment of a PR linking to this line".
Same concept applies to comments/commits/authors/etc. If the UI shows me a username, I should be able to pull up a "who is that again" inspector. Going into github's commit view, clicking on a name... and being sent to a filtered list of that person's commits makes zero sense to me because this is the ONLY place where that happens. That behaviour should be a "recent commits" button inside some "user inspector".
i'm not aware of the old macOS inspector pattern, but this sounds super interesting and i agree with the critique of inconsistency in github's behavior.
this reminds me a tad of superhuman's right panel too which auto-populates upon writing a time (or typing a name i believe?), which is a feature i do find personally useful as well.
i haven't thought seriously about hovers on nouns quite yet, but this is giving me much to munch on.
The UI is a bit odd at first, and there are obvious things that need to be fixed (like the invisible input fields), but by the time I had created an account, I'd gotten used to it, and I appreciate how incredibly fast it is.
I'm a bit worried about this:
> How does gitdot make money?
> We don't.
> We are fortunate enough to have raised a small pre-seed
> round from investors (...)
I'd rather know now how you're making money than find out in three years when I'm invested in the platform.
I would humbly suggest that a reasonable site should assume that the user has set the comfortable font size in the browser, and make all other font sizes in percentages, or using rem units.
Interesting. It seems that perhaps a good mental model for solutions like this is to start federating to each other rather than to centralize and create replacement walled gardens. Mastodon style activity feeds might be a good starting point for this.
The value of Github is not just hosting projects and issue tracking but the notion that it's probably the largest professional network of developers that can interact with each other, create pull requests and issues on each other's projects, etc. There are many GH alternatives but very few with the same global network of essentially almost every developer out there.
Instead of everybody creating new accounts on each other's not quite Github clones with only a handful of users, why not improve on the state of the art here and allow people to use their user account from a server of their choice and create a proper alternative to Github?
I see a lot of people trying to capitalize on GitHub's recent failings, and I feel like everyone trying to shoot their shot in this space is missing one key aspect: Git is a terrible TERRIBLE piece of software.
I have spent a considerable amount of time learning git, not because I wanted to, but because someone else in my team didn't and inevitably t-boned our repository with a proverbial freight train running commands they didn't understand. It is absolutely unacceptable for a program designed EXACTLY for the purpose of maintaining a history and backup of the evolution of a program to be so unwieldy and occasionally dangerous to use. We can absolutely do better than Git.
Not asking to be pokey, genuinely curious because I have heard similar from a consistent couple camps... what stack you develop in and what VCS do you prefer?
Ironically, Git is my preferred VCS. I have used Perforce Helix, Mercurial, and SVN. It is the best of the worst. I don't think anyone in the space has made a truly great product.
Painting with a broad brush I feel like the people who still don't like git either worked with mercurial and liked it more, want to be sort of hipster or counter culture and use fossil, or work in microsoft shops or game dev shops.
Sample size is small but it's been consistent for me over the past 20 years.
I like p4/helix for the locking when working on something like a game where you need assets to be handled more carefully since there's a lot of binary floating around but despise the company and the sales / licensing games. I had a rep just ignore me completely when I emailed wanting to cancel and ended up having to go find the director of the sales org on linkedin and get him involved (and it was cancelled within 24 hours).
This sounds like a process + human problem, not a technology problem. To me, it sounds like your team lacks discipline and competence. Sorry bud, going to categorically disagree with your sentiment that git is terrible.
Exactly. Git is an amazing piece of software. If a team can’t use Git, which is still the simplest and most reliable way to track project history, I wouldn’t have much confidence in their ability to produce quality software.
Well, for a more positive comment (since everything seems to be negative - and nobody brought that up) the site is very fast. In fact pretty much everything changes instantly when i click on stuff, which is very rare. The only exception seems to be when looking at some files with a long history (not sure why the history needs to be displayed by default though).
That said, from a UX perspective, personally i prefer Forgejo - which isn't that much slower either (judging from Codeberg, it isn't instant but it is fast enough to feel "fast").
"Better" is a strong word without proven analysis or some kind of statistic, that honestly caught me off-guard as when you state that I expect something like a product like Bitbucket, obviously as you can imagine. Either way, cool project.
a lot of this we've really come to know as we dug into both it, gittea, gitlab, and all of their internals.
i think the short answer as to a differentiator is design.
our goal's to just build the best product possible, one that we'd love to use and one that we hope developers do too.
some of the stuff we've been thinking about include: stacked diffs as PR primitive, a Nix-based CI (that's reproducible and locally testible), a super simple and intuitive bug tracker, and just making the site super duper fast and pleasant to use.
that is to say, there is a _lot_ of surface area that a software forge covers and i think there's a lot of room to make things better.
hope that's clear enough, apologies for any ambiguities, we do NOT have all the answers quite yet haha
I'm a bit confused, aren't the Forgejo people trying to build the "best product possible", too? And there's more of them, and they have funding, and… between 2 good forges or 1 great one, I rather have 1 great one… I guess you're not interested in joining them because it's not Rust?
i think the honest answer here is autonomy. the freedom to choose our own tech stack, our own product priorities, and our own design.
i'll also admit that i don't know forgejo's own priorities as well as i do our own, and that is negligence that we're due to correct. maybe they are perfectly aligned and it does make sense for us to join forces.
but just as with any FOSS project, they have the freedom to choose what they work on as do we, and i intend on respecting that.
Personally I dont care if it is written in Rust or anything else. What I do care is stability, security and features.
I would have enhanced the dashboard a little bit. I understand most of the work was done in the backend. But dashboard is what folks see first. and might lead someone incorrectly judging the work just by looking at that.
Downvote me into oblivion or whatever: It's not relevant to me in the slightest whether you built it in Rust or not, or even Python, Go, Java, Node, PHP etc. There is lots of great and terrible, fast and slow software written in each. OP might only have 3 months of programming experience for all I know.
Why is "made with Rust" any more relevant than "made with Go" to an end user of a software product? It just doesn't matter.
Pre LLMs it did matter, not rust specifically but the language itself. It meant the difference between asking the developer for a feature/fix and getting it done myself if needed.
Now not so much with LLMs, but it does signal something about the development, deployment and supply chain risks involved.
I built https://GitFar.com to clone my private repos off GitHub and host them without their limits using 100%-GitHub compatible APIs! It is stateless, and only uses system tools like rg and git! Gives me complete freedom which I can truly enjoy pairing it with ZFS subvolumes tuned for the different content types in my repos (text, images, video, etc.)!
Nothing that claimed to be a better GitHub was even GitHub enough to begin with.
GitFar an internal a drop-in replacement for our devs to just change the hostname and keep using exactly the same APIs with exactly the same request and response shapes with extensions delivered through request and response headers!
The minimal look feels very refreshing, and yet it's not disorienting like many minimal web git UIs are in my experience; I actually feel like I know how to navigate this thing. Site feels very snappy too, especially with those instantly loading file previews when you hover. Congrats!
It seems like the site is currently getting hugged so I can't look but I'm glad someone is trying to achieve a more minimalistic take on the UX of a software forge. It seems like an area with good room for improvement.
Big fan of the design! Different but easy to get a hand of. Having /profile also be linked on the homepage with the other main pages for ease of navigation would be nice, the profile link at the bottom feels like it clashes with the rest of the UI to my eyes.
Would be interested in a comparison with https://sourcehut.org/ (which has a comparable minimal aesthetic, but also has the deep benefit of being FOSS.
As a banner or something, maybe. But I'd much rather see a broken-looking site on mobile than see nothing at all on mobile.
In the same category: websites that display nothing but a splash screen "This site requires Internet Explorer X" or whatever. Don't nanny me, just feed my browser the HTML! Whether my browser can render it properly is my problem, not yours.
The landing page is still a "join the waitlist" placeholder and there hasn't been a single commit since one week after they announced it, ten months ago. Together with the entire repo and the ShowHN post itself being vibed through and through, it seems apparent that putting any amount of human effort into that project was never on the agenda. Which naturally leads one to wonder, what makes this project different?
This is unfair, and the vibe-coded swipe is unnecessary. Why would anyone continue working on a project if it's not seeing any adoption or interest? Many large successful apps were borne out of sharp pivots - Slack comes to mind.
I would perhaps be less inclined to make a point out of the vibe coding if they had not literally put "anti-AI" in the title as a key point of their marketing (although Dang removed it). I think it's absolutely fair to point out the hypocrisy and disingenuity of marketing a vibe-coded product in that way.
It is entirely reasonable that you could use AI to build a product with no AI features. Why is that hypocritical? Especially for a product like a GitHub -- it's a reasonable take to say "AI is useful tool to produce code, but I don't want 851 random "Ask AI!" adornments all over my website when I just want to read the code."
unfortunate name: very similar to Godot at passing glance. my brain already stumbles going back and forth between seeing LLVM and LLM, IP (Internet protocol) and IP (Intellectual property). Don't me started on X vs X vs X vs ...
I do like that it reinforces this rule of thumb:
Q: "How do you know if any given piece of software is written in Rust?
A: "Oh they'll tell you. They *will* tell you. Upfront and over and over again."
This is really interesting. Especially as its open source and I really liked the UI design of it.
I was thinking about creating my own git forge given the unreliability of Github and I wouldn't be able to create just at the moment incredibly reliable software like git forge although I could use AI to create a minimalist piece of software, I didn't because I didn't want to create yet another AI slop fighting another AI slop (github/gitlab).
Forejo is incredible but I have always wanted to get more alternatives in this field.
Much thanks for making it. I have signed up and I have high hopes for it too and I will try to either self host this on my servers or gitdot.io as well as Github
I recommend making a small community in matrix (preferred), fluxer.gg, discord etc. as I'd like to join it.
PS: small personal thing that I have made which helps in making communities: https://mirror.forum
I am definitely interested in gitdot.io! This seems incredible
I wish nothing but the best for you folks. Gonna create a local copy of the source code of gitdot.io right now!
Thanks for open-sourcing the efforts too. I really appreciate it :-D The software is so nice!
I genuinely hope that you guys and the project blows up and if you guys might ever hire a junior dev, I hope you all could remember me as the world right now needed such software that you have made!! :-D (Although I am more interested in managing servers/golang but that's because rust is hard to learn as a beginner but that's different topic but I like rust's ideas too and rust is a great/preferred language with golang for this type of service :-D)
Thanks for the support, we really appreciate it. We want to create/support communities within the app in the future (via issues, etc) but ya it's a good idea to form some channels.
It might be a bit difficult to self-host at the moment (as we don't have a good documentation to do so) but you can try and let us know how it goes.
Seems interesting an I'll take more of a peek after work, but one thing that stood out to me is the only way back to the home page after navigating to a repo is the back button. Going back to the home page via the back button also doesn't retain that "new" was selected. But I agree with others, I do like the simplicity of the site.
this hn thread is interesting as it feels like i'm getting to revisit a lot of decisions i've made in the design haha.
i debated this for a while too, some of my thinking for how it is is that i wanted the focus of a repository page to be _the repository_. so as much as we can, trim things that might detract.
it was also done with the intention that it's actually pretty rare for a user to find or explore repositories on github (more likely you find them here on hn or on twitter), so had the restraint of really trying _not_ to make gitdot anything like social media.
but thank you nonetheless for the feedback, i'll revisit it proper and see if i can make this more intuitive.
I think I can understand that reasoning. I do have a tendency to explore, especially at the start since it gives me a view of what the site can already do, cause I wouldn't want to run into issues with my own projects without knowing of the possible limitations ahead of time.
If anything since the keyboard shortcut already exists, you could always put it in little cursor menu at the bottom of the screen. But yeah up to you, I look forward to your progress.
I’m not sure I agree with all of your takes either. For example, I’m not anti-AI for coding, so that immediately made me click away. I’m glad I read the comments though because I think the take of “not using your code to train AI” makes a lot more sense.
But, I wanted to say thanks for posting this and being really open in the comments. It’s hard to get so much feedback so quickly. It’s a firehouse of criticism that’s hard to deal with.
thank you mbreese, i know folks can be mean and i also recognize where they're coming from (we are certainly far from perfect), but this comment is nice to read.
I think you're in an interesting space where there's a real opportunity to create something fresh. When people are actively looking for alternatives it will be easier to break out of the established norms.
What does anti-AI mean? Don't really see anything about it in the design doc except "no AI copilot".
but overall, the general ethos is to focus on the problems that AI is introducing as of now and how we can help solve them, rather than just build AI features with abandon assuming that they're good.
some stuff that we do know about: the influx of slop PRs / slop issues on popular repositories, losing agency our own of code as we AI generates more, and privacy/sovereignty of code.
i've talked a bit about stacked diffs which we do see as one concrete stab in that direction, but a lot here is to be admittedly sketched out.
> [...] you may not use any of the Marks as a syllable in a new word or as part of a portmanteau (e.g., "Gitalicious", "Gitpedia") used as a mark for a third-party product or service.
> Please be aware that GitHub and GitLab are exceptions to this Policy because they are subject to explicit licensing arrangements that pre-date, and thus take precedence, over this Policy.
You might've known that if you hadn't vibe-launched this while for some reason marketing it as anti-AI, but here we are in a world where basic research is a dead art.
I’d love to hear an IP lawyer weigh in on this, because I’ve never heard of this kind of thing before. It doesn’t seem correct that you can use trademark alone like this to extend beyond the actual word used in the trademark. Maybe it’s from licensing or something, ie maybe if a product uses the actual git product, then the git license means you can’t use the name as part of a word.
i will be honest and say that we didn't do our due diligence here (we simply assumed that it would be okay to do so, given the existence of GitHub, GitLab, GitKraken, GitButler, and so forth).
that portmanteaus are prohibited by the policy that the Git PLC enforces, which as Jeff notes in his email above, does grant incumbent advantages to grandfathered names (e.g., GitHub, GitLab).
we'll reach out to the conservancy, ask for explicit permission, and if not, rebrand.
In my opinion (which may be worth little), by using "git" in your product's name today you are also locking onto that technology. So if an another or better VCS comes along (like jj) that you want to embrace it could be harder. (Kind of like how Bitbucket betted wrongly on hg, then later added and switched to git).
Trademark law is ridiculously slanted in favour of existing rightsholders. The most famous example I know of is "McSleep Inn", which was sued by McDonalds and forced to change their name. I think that ruling was complete bullshit, because Mc is so generic and usually a prime factor of trademark law is whether the businesses operate in similar domains, but it goes to show how broad the protections can be. Something like "GitFoo", which is explicitly being used specifically on a site for hosting Git repositories, doesn't stand a chance in hell, and rightfully so because this is actually trying to take advantage of Git's name to market their product.
They might have been sued, but did they change the name just to settle out of court? McDonald’s failed to maintain the trademark on “Big Mac” in Europe when it actually went to a court room https://www.theguardian.com/business/article/2024/jun/05/big...
They did not settle, hence my usage of the wording "ruling" and "forced to change".
> For the reasons given the Court finds and concludes that (1) McDonald's is entitled to enforce its family of marks that are characterized by the combination of the prefix "Mc" with a generic word; (2) the name McSleep Inn is likely to cause an appreciable number of the public to be confused by believing that McSleep Inn is sponsored, associated, affiliated, connected, or endorsed by McDonald's; and (3) the adoption and use by Quality International of the name McSleep Inn was a deliberate attempt to benefit by the good will and reputation of McDonald's. Therefore, the Court will find trademark infringement, unfair competition, and dilution under the Illinois statute (Ill.Rev.Stat. Ch. 140, § 22).
> Git is open source/public domain. Trademarks don't apply to it.
Public domain and open source are two completely unrelated concepts. If open source were public domain, you could not license usage of it (MIT, GPL, etc.). What is the point of confidently asserting something you're completely ignorant about as though it were factual?
That’s not right. You can very much apply trademarks to open-source software. See for example Mozilla Firefox. Also, open-source and public domain are not the same thing. Finally, git is GPL.
hrm. so i guess if the question is why not just make a software forge that is _only_ based in the CLI, the answer i think is convenience.
it's very convenient to be sent a link (or find it on hacker news) and to be able to click around files, read the README, understand what a repository is about without having to clone it and open locally. plus -- if you only need a barebones git server with no web UI, git provides this by default.
if the question is, will you build a CLI / what will be in it?
the answer is yes, we do have a barebones CLI for auth as of now, do envision things like managing issues / PRs from the CLI, but want to make sure that strike the right balance there.
i think TUIs can be deceptively hard to build well, and admittedly, it hasn't been a priority for us quite yet.
Appreciate the effort you put into building and getting this product live. It's already more than most do even with LLMs!
However, I think the value proposition should be much higher than simply "GitHub in Rust". GitHub is still a great, complex product, despite its recent problems. There should be some sort of x10 (or at least x5) improvement that will make people _consider_ migrating.
> We view AI as an implementation detail — and do not think that using it is necessarily good.
> In fact, we think it makes many products worse by acting as a bandaid for poor design.
> That isn’t to say we are blind to it, but that we will be judicious in our use of it instead.
Not sure I follow. What feature are the developers referring to? I understand that AI will power tools that may or may not fit a particular use case. How is AI a feature and what does it mean to be anti-AI?
yeah thanks for digging in, this was a bit ambiguous.
so take this to mean - 1) no AI copilot in the app and 2) no training on your data nor selling of it.
our take on AI is that we should focus on building tools that help address its limitations; one of the things we're particularly keen on is building stacked diffs into reviews as a primitive, so it's easier to review a large AI-generated (or assisted) PR. (e.g., diff 1 for API changes, diff 2 for backend wireup, diff 3 for front-end changes)
i think to do that, we're going to try and hook into the subscriptions that people already have and are paying for: Claude, Codex, rather than package our own, but some of that is a bit hacky to do.
AI is rapidly becoming a synonym for enshittification. It can be a little aggravating. I am trying to judiciously use terms like "agent" or "LLM" so I can avoid just lazily saying "AI", which is often a pejorative term now.
So like: not to hijack thread -- but is there any way to post about what you've built on HN without making people angry if its vibe coded? What's the etiquette there because I have a thingy I am going to post soon (open source, non commerical) and don't really want to be ripped apart by HN. I am a software engineer but doubt that matters if it's all vibe coded.
If you aren't willing to be ripped apart then posting isn't the right move, simple as that. Public critique is part of sharing your work in any space, HN included.
Be honest and transparent about who you are what you have and what you did. If it took you a year of solid development, it'll probably look like it did. If it took you 15 minutes in Claude... well it probably looks like it did too.
If you are YC backed then say "YC Winter 2026" or whatever in your title frankly - people will work it out anyway.
They said it was a better GitHub, which is a very high bar (despite the regular complaints about GitHub). They also said it was anti-AI, despite it being vibe-coded.
Also, know your competitive space. Posting on HN is like pitching - not knowing about your competitors is not really going to work - you need an answer for, for example, why someone picks Gitdot over SourceHut.
I see "anti-AI" in the description and I wonder what that entails. Then I try to look at one of those tending links and all I encounter is "Mobile support to come.", and mobile is my primary device for checking things out. I want to stay positive about the future if this project, but Idk what to think here.
my fixation here is to make everything load instant, but that is dependent on server latencies, which right now is admittedly slow as we only have one server in the US.
Developers can champion their preferred language all they want, whether it's Rust, dirt, or grime. What matters to me is having viable alternative platforms and seeing active experimentation with new projects and features.
Looking forward to seeing even more features, gitdot.
Would you pledge in a crowd-funding campaign to build something like this?
You'd want something that doesn't allow training on private repos, so ideally not a private company that can change owners and managers and hence policies over time.
It's an interesting business case - open source website, revenue generating with some type of "open" business structure.
Its first repos could be of itself.
I had this idea for enabling pull requests to be in "pipelines" with each request crowd-funded (as an option) to thereby entice action. A small split could return to the main site itself for upkeep.
Oxenai is private but their vcs is open source including the server, so you could self host it for free and use it with other people. The vcs itself is a little bit like git but with native large fial support
I could be wrong but I think besides being able to self host for free you can also pay for something where they help you set it up and stuff
Something nifty also that you can do is that instead of them training on your data they enable you to train your own models on it and download the weights.
Definitely agreed its hard to trust anything you cant audit 100%. I think a non profit structured the right way would probably be pretty trustworthy not to do anything egregious like training on your data though. Or some way maybe to make the thing transparent so you know what happens with the data and you can basically audit the company somehow. I dont know if you would need to go as far as encrypted repos, that seems a little too paranoid but that would be a really interesting idea for a company although the target audience is probably limited
The first unique characteristic is that it was built in Rust? Why does it matter from a user perspective? I was expecting the first point to be something that would convince me to check it out.
Unless the goal is to find people to collaborate on building the software. I got a bit confused.
fair critique. i'll refrain from it in the future.
but i will say that the point of our post isn't to really sell anyone here or on anything. we kinda know that our product as-is isn't ready to use at real scale (we lack issues, prs, ci, gotta fix a lot of bugs, etc.)
we did just want to sincerely share what we built.
and rust is a part of that, we chose it cause we wanted to learn it and we then quickly found out that we really liked it too.
While we're critiquing, the demographics that I'm part of has trouble taking someone seriously who is too lazy or sloppy to use the Shift key and complete punctutation.
And after looking at the site more, I have to say I'm pretty interested. It is a nice-feeling site. There's a few UI oddities that need to have the rough edges sanded off, but I very much like the main approach.
Me, on an international team, as learned that flawless english sentences as a metric about as silly as dress codes in business. I'll take my california laidback-ness to your stuffy NYC banker rules.
The demographics I'm part of have trouble taking seriously people who yell at kids who live two blocks away when someone from one block away wanders onto the yard the kids are playing in.
> Unless the goal is to find people to collaborate on building the software.
Surely it is at least in part. We're talking about the announcement of a new open source project that isn't ready to use yet which would presumably enjoy people helping make it work for them, and a new startup around that open source project that is likely to be hiring in the future (or even maybe right now? Didn't check).
> Why does it matter from a user perspective
It implies that there was likely a small degree of rigour in the construction... not a large one (very little software has that)... and not a guarantee... but likely more than the abysmally small average in the software world.
And I'm tired of the "tired of 'built in Rust'" arguments because it also shouldn't matter if someone happens to describe their project that you didn't have to go out of your way to talk about in a way that bothers you. But I'm shooting right at the "tired of 'built in Rust'" culture here.
You can take these arguments to an unbounded level of depth; someone can be tired of my responses to the responses to so me someone happening to care about something different than them. It's all equally silly, and if you're convinced that your level of depth is reasonable but the others aren't, I'd highly recommend trying to think about why you're so confident that your opinion is important but ones that come after aren't, because it's very unclear to anyone who doesn't already agree with you, and that's usually a sign that there's no point in saying it at all.
Fair point is actually “less is les here.” It’s more of an alternative to Gitea than to GitHub, where managing Git is almost an afterthought. Or maybe you haven’t used GitHub recently. But sorry you cannot cal this better GitHub.
Congrats on shipping this. Self-hosted + open source is exactly the
combination I keep reaching for these days. Out of curiosity, how heavy
is it to run — could it run comfortably on an M1 Mac (16GB RAM)?
The UI isn't very attractive; I’d like to see the font size increased, as my eyesight has deteriorated significantly from working at a computer for long periods.
Does it have a CLI like github? Does it follow GIT? I made an account and did not migrate my repos, as I'd like to test this before moving in... Thanks in advance!
From quickly reading their source this morning, it does not seem to scale well.
on-disk git repo's, and postgres for everything else (with objects on cloudflareR2 or GCP?)
Feels like one can just copy the UI and use it for forgejo. It would get something similar very quickly, and avoid handling all the difficult stuff I guess.
git itself is decentralised - all repos are equal. Mr T designed it that way because ... well that's all that was needed for Linux kernel development back in the day and it still seems to work. The management stuff can be managed quite well via email and some choice socials. Obviously that nonsense cannot possibly scale to the size of your enterprise thingies!
Yet again we have a better Big Brother than Big Brother ... this time with Rust, yum!
I love the design. Clean and refreshing - you start at the left and every sub element goes to the right. Like a file browser. And the commit screen is dense but super readable. I would move the summary column from the right of the README to the left of the README on the /home screen (and call /home the /README).
Loading files is very slow but I assume that's because HN is hammering the server.
I am not a believer in negative advertising. So I don't give a poop you are anti-ai. Or "better" than Github (better for who??). Just imply you are a code forge thats made for serious developers who need something engineered to be fast and reliable.
I wish you the best of luck, I can see Linear coming out with git repos after coming out with a diff reader. I have a suspicion there's space for many code forges in the market as you build out more features, especially if you lean into your products hacker-y-ness
Just one minor piece of feedback that's unlikely to be a priority. I cannot fully navigate when browsing in a terminal browser (chawan in my case, haven't tried with w3m or lynx). For example the "h" keymap for going home does not work.
That said though, one of my pet peeves around browsing Github Web from the terminal was having to click "skip to content" just to get the body. So you definitely delivered there (after having read your design post). Good luck with the rest of the year.
This project looks awesome. I’ve really enjoyed your blogs about the design process and learnings. Brave to jump into Rust while learning a new domain but very commendable. Wish I had a close programmer friend to do this stuff with, sounds like a great asset to have such great chemistry.
You seem to be experienced devs, so I’m sure you already know, but don’t listen to the contrarians on HN. They’ll suck the life out of you because it’s not 100% the way they like it.
“Written in X”. Every time I look elsewhere when I see it. When is people starting to think about features instead of “it’s better because I rewrote it in X!!”
Yes, this particular UX is poor. It's not intuitive that clicking the filename has different behavior from clicking elsewhere in the file's row. Expanding the row inline needs a leading widget.
This particular issue is solved in GitHub proper, and derives from the Windows 95 tree view widget [1], which I seem to remember from Windows 3.x but can't find a screenshot.
The hover behavior is just not an intuitive or accessible default. I can't imagine someone being able to use this if they have a hard time clicking without moving the mouse. It also wastes resources fetching file/directory contents while the user is moving the cursor to a predetermined file they presumably wish to open.
this thing looks slopped together in day. I don't even know what I'm looking at when I go to the home page. Good luck with it, but I think you have a VERY long road ahead of you.
Personally if I wanted to leave Github, I would just move over to Gitlab.
yeah this is because we're currently (very temporarily) hosting things in NFS and git stat operations are very slow since they assume a fast file FS. we'll fix that in a few.
and yeahhhh, i do try to be very non-marketing in all that i say, but something about the title made me a bit ambitious, apologies.
Bit odd it was missing at all. Makes me wonder how well the core infrastructure you're building on is understood, and how trustworthy any of this really is. If all I'm getting is some vibeslop, with zero expertise or skill added, even basic stuff like this, why shouldnt I just vibe my own better version tailored to my needs exactly? Same headaches as with your app (though likely less give what's on display), only now I dont pay you to give me headaches and I retain control.
The software was never the moat. The skills and experience crystalised within it was, and remains, the product.
However there is justice for commenting poorly, there doesn't seem to be justice for posting lies and deceit, which is borderline a serial case here(?).
That question does comes up quite a bit, so I try to occasionally post an in-depth explanation. Maybe I'll do that here.
We can answer the question by rephrasing it. I would put it this way: "is it ok to be wrong on HN"? The key change is to replace charged words like "lies" and "deceit" with the neutral word "wrong".
People do lie and deceive, but to tell that apart from just plain being-wrong requires knowing someone's intent, and this is not something that moderators (or readers in general) can do. Even courts of law have a hard time doing that! HN comments don't contain nearly enough information to decide it. You would have to have a mind reader [1].
Worse, readers are far too quick to assume lies, deceit, etc., in other commenters that they happen to dislike or disagree with. The internet is rife with this, as we all know. Most of these insinuations are imaginary—we are all too inclined to attribute disingenuousness to the other side. One can easily see this by looking at how the same accusations are made against one's own side.
Once the question has been rephrased in this way, it answers itself: of course it's ok to be wrong on HN. How could it not be? Most of us are mostly wrong about most things. Moreover, being wrong is part of eventually getting something right. Curious conversation, which HN exists for, often involves mistakes, and sometimes the mistakes (or seeming mistakes) turn out to be creative.
Even if we decided it was not ok to be wrong, how would we enforce that? We don't have a truth meter [2].
As we have neither a mind reader nor a truth meter, we can't base moderation on anything that requires knowing people's intent or knowing the truth about things. We need criteria that can be decided from people's observable behavior on the site. As I sometimes put it, we can only moderate by effects [3].
That's why HN's guidelines are they way they are (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) - there's nothing in there which requires us to know what someone's intent is, nor whether they are right or wrong on a topic. At least I hope there isn't!
What about the truth, then - do we care about it at all? Of course we do. It's critical! But working out what's true vs. what's false is the province of the community, not the mods. It's the commenters' job to do that, e.g. by answering bad arguments with better ones and false information with true. And they should do this within the site guidelines, e.g. by being respectful and curious rather than aggressive and accusatory.
The moderators' job is to hold the container for this or (if you like) to keep the playing field fair. This isn't possible in any complete way - there are far too many factors pushing things into messy, unsatisfying places. But we do what we can.
Well actually, spacex owned xai is now coding AI in C while earlier it was rust; I guess with the attitude that a language good enough to control rockets is fine for ai.
No mobile version, but I'm visiting from a tablet, should work at least if switch to "Desktop" in the browser manually. I don't care if I get horizontal scroll - not showing your visitors anything at all is an automatic "I'm out".
Second, when I browsed from an actual desktop, and clicked on links for files it was all slow as hell - specifically the part when you click on a file an expect it to just load, you instead get: 1) some layout switch which looks like page reload 2) then it says "loading..." for several seconds.
After looking at the source code, it appears to be React or similar frontend framework... Ugh. I don't know why people choose to use that stuff, just have a regular SSR which would work a hundred times faster and is more pleasant. And if you really want an SPA, don't use React, Vue or Svelte (and similar), it's horrible and always slow.
Finally, since this appears to be a YC company, it shouldn't matter what's it written in. In fact, I don't even know why Rust would be a good thing here when Go or even Rails/Django would work just fine - but again, it just reinforces the meme that if it's written in Rust, you'll surely hear about it.
Overall, the minimalism idea is welcomed, but it supposedly should appeal to people like myself and it doesn't for all the reasons I mentioned above.
I have to agree with the proposition that if you are aiming for the performant, no frills deal - and the aesthetic certainly telegraphs this - you really do not need client-side render, nor overengineered frontend frameworks like React & friends. Ditto for Styled Components (looks like you're not using the latter).
I agree. I like the website, looks minimal, but minimalism is not reflected in the stack.
The look only seems minimal as well. I need to zoom in to read, which eventually destroys the layout. A minimal website has at least basic accessibility by default, this uses some kind of "modern" styling stuff to ruin it.
Yeah, seems like everything just seems minimal, but not actually is.
This. "No loading animations" works if you rely on the browser's loading indicators that all users will be familiar with.
@OP, if you're up for a rewrite of the frontend, happy to help you get started with https://mastrojs.github.io
haven't written up a show hn post yet but i launched this weekend a server app for git i built all in Zig[1]
[1]: https://astheno.software/shale/
demo site https://git.mirrors.nektro.net/
absolutely this, and I feel the same way about finding it unappealing due to the inconsistency between their "talk" and their "walk". If you preach minimalism but use React or anything similar, you've lost the plot and don't understand what minimalism is at all.
> In fact, I don't even know why Rust would be a good thing here when Go or even Rails/Django would work just fine
FWIW I've noticed that agents are pretty good at writing "High-Level Rust" for most basic applications, which gives you pretty great performance (orders of magnitude faster than RoR), great deployment, probably great security if steered by a senior, and pretty great maintenance again if originally steered by a senior. I feel like this is a not-so-secret secret.
I personally won't be using dynamic languages for anything but toy scripts now. (well, except JS, which is hard to avoid with the massive size of WASM bundles)
P.S. I assume Go is still great as well, but IMO Go no longer has an identity. What are they going for anyways? Garbage collected rust? "How to invent a perfect niche and then throw it all away in 21 days". /rant
Identity? Most folks don't think that way anymore. I try to funnel them from Python to GO. I want to ship binaries. I want them to think about dependencies and if they really need them.
TBH I don't have anything more to add that hasn't already been discussed here and in previous threads: https://github.com/golang/go/issues/77273
It's probably polarizing and I honestly don't know why I felt the need to rant about it. /shrug
Please, stop using "written in Rust" as some kind of advantage or killer feature.
From what I can see, it would be more accurate if they wrote "slopped by LLMs" :-)
I am indeed curious to see how an agent-coded project turns out in the long term.
Coherencey from LLMs decreases as the source increases in volume, waiting to see how this all turns out.
> Coherencey from LLMs decreases as the source increases in volume, waiting to see how this all turns out.
I wonder if feature velocity closely tracks LLM context management innovations.
May be this encourages more modular systems if those improvements can't come fast enough.
If the design was done with Claude Code/Design it would be a lot better than this imo. Bland, but better.
No, it is an advantage.
I am not a rust evangelist, I am not a rust programmer or programmer at all; however while evaluating tools to use, anything written in Rust and Go at-least gets me to look at the project in more detail, since they most likely are able to ship statically linked binaries, which has been one of the key criteria for my personal evaluation of tools to select and use.
So, you might not consider it as a valid signal, however it might be for other users. Even if it has a negative connotation for you. Which in itself, again might be a good filter in case you don’t want to use it.
"single binary, no dependencies besides crypto" would be an advantage, "written in Rust" tells nothing, except (successfully) trying to clickbait
There is no lie or misleading information about rust in the title so it’s clearly not clickbait.
> There is no lie or misleading information about rust in the title so it’s clearly not clickbait.
That’s not what clickbait means at all.
That’s exactly what clickbait means:
Clickbait (also known as link bait or linkbait) is a text or a thumbnail link that is designed to attract attention and to entice users to follow ("click") that link and view, read, stream or listen to the linked piece of online content, being typically deceptive, sensationalized, or otherwise misleading.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clickbait
It expresses the exact same thing you've just said and more with fewer words.
no, it's just clickbait.
- Rust is huge, many options, many programming styles
- typical Rust project has lots of transitive dependencies
- there is nothing in Rust that disallows using system libraries or linking to them
- it's not even true that the program is going to be mem-safe because there could still be unsafe {} either in the repo, or in any of the transitive deps. not to say that safety is broader than just mem-safety.
if you think "written in Rust" says anything, I'd argue that you might give it a try and find out yourself. I did that, and I am glad I am out. the reason why I am telling you is because I've been click-baited (into Rust) before, and it took me few years to realize all of this, and to make a move.
I've been writing Rust for over a decade. Yes, "written in rust" says something.
You can write git in any language, I don't see an advantage doing it in Rust besides the community and potential of promotion to that community.
You can write any program in any language, but there are definitely benefits of using some languages for some programs. If you disagree with this statement, there's nothing else to discuss, we have irreconcilable differences.
You just responded to a comment giving a specific advantage that applies to Rust and a few other languages which doesn't apply to a large amount of other languages (single static binary).
How can you still not see any advantage? Or was the point of your comment to say that you think the only real motivation is self or Rust promotion, suggesting some dishonesty amongst the people you're responding to?
Sure, but we're talking about a git web UI with a little icing, not a git replacement (at least in most cases). Even so, Rust and Go web projects are much more lighterweight than projects in most other languages, with drastically less effort towards performance, and use less resources as a result, requiring less hardware to operate.
How is statically linked binaries an unique advantage of rust or go? you can do the same with C, C++, pascal, ada, zig, and more. Rust even doesnt do the static binary file by default.
You might have better devops experience as an end-user of the said software if its statically linked and its a good trend in software sure but it is not unique to go or rust.
Admitting you don't know how to code and still trying to argue rust is better is just wild sorry.
Zig and probably Pascal have the same advantage, can't speak for Ada as I've never built it.
C and C++? You've got to be joking. If the project provides static binaries, sure, but I don't want to have to worry about finding a necronomicon and summoning the correct kind of imp required to properly use whatever insane build system the project is using.
And thus, we all agree that Linux, Windows, and OS X are all bad software, because they're written in C and C++ and have insanely complicated build systems.
Is that even controversial?
You are missing the point here. Single binary files are not what makes a programming language good or bad.
Its like saying "I want a red car because it goes fast" when people are actually disucssing how the engine works or how easy/difficult is it to drive etc.
You cannot base your like/dislike on that single criteria and expect that to actually make sense.
This totally depends.
For some people, Linux package management is not solved. Static binaries at least work for deployment.
More useful for client software, but you can’t just dismiss someone for having this preference given the poor viability of running arbitrary binaries on Linux due to GNU’s userland style.
No, it does not depend. Your parent is correct with his analogy.
Linux package management is solved, if it depends on something, it depends on the specific Linux distribution, but "Linux" package management is definitely solved.
Off: I thought I am becoming dumb, but this really puts me in a new perspective. The odd thing is that even people who work in IT hold similar beliefs. I am not entirely sure what is going on. Favoring a language so blindly seems like a thing, apparently? For example they seem to have convinced themselves that Rust is "safe" if you use it for anything (without implementing the security features) because it is (memory) safe? I did not imagine beginners would make such a mistake either, but alas.
I noticed your comment is getting downvoted. I wish I knew why though. Is it because of your analogy? Is it because they think that somehow "single binary" has anything to do with the programming language? Would like to know. I am not going to assume that it is a confirmation of what I wrote earlier.
There's a pretty strong culture of "no static linking because I need to replace the .so to preserve my freedom hurr durr" in a lot of Linux spaces, so quite a few of these C/C++ FOSS libraries are a pain in the ass to statically link.
Literally last week I was porting something to Linux and had to rewrite the libwayland build scripts because they only expose a shared object.
There's also an expectation that you're going to install them via your system's package manager, not build them, so a lot of them use insane build systems (autotools, meson).
You are right that there are many of us who prefer the package manager, there are so many reasons why a package manager makes your life wonderful. Debian has always been a proponent of dynamic linking. When you create a Linux distribution that is a big plus.
For me install size matters and statically linked stuff are too big sometimes. Of course a 100MB go statically compiled binary has huge advantages now days.
> Rust even doesnt do the static binary file by default.
Huh? It does. Only libc is dynamically linked, by default, which --iirc-- all programs will commonly need anyway. All the rest is statically linked.
In fact, it takes some hoop-jumping to build dynamically linked binaries with cargo.
If the binary still depends on libc.so.6 (glibc) at runtime, then it is not a fully static binary (read: not a static binary). It is a dynamically linked executable, albeit one where most non-libc dependencies have been statically linked.
I am not going to pretend I know Rust enough to comment (yes, would be a minute check), I was just commenting on the "Only libc is dynamically linked" bit.
That's the default. One can also statically bind that libc.so.6 quite easily. Though that's not the default.
edit: Ironically, that makes shipping the binary a tad harder, since this "linux" version won't "magically" run on about every Linux, or mac version on mac, etc. I guess that's why its not the default, though that's just me guessing.
I really was just commenting on the "Only libc is dynamically linked" bit. But yeah, there are cons and pros of dynamic vs static. :)
It is not about being able to make static binaries or really anything that has to do with anything technical. It is more of a cultural thing - the culture in some languages is to link dependencies dynamically (C/C++) whereas the culture in others is to link dependencies statically (Go, not sure about Rust).
Personally i do not even write Go myself yet when i see some webapp made in Go i'm pretty much always sure that it'll be a self-contained static binary. Yes, there are probably exceptions (and i haven't surveyed all webapps made with Go) but it has been common enough to feel as the standard approach to me - and if i ever decide to make a binary webapp, i'll probably reach for Go to do it.
The benefit is the static compilation.
But the "Written in rust" stuff comes with so much falsehood baggage about automatic best-in-class performance, automatic perfect safety, automatic rigor, that it is detrimental to just say "written in rust" and not provide a more nuanced statement about why that's good (or just drop it as a headline item!). You might not agree because you can single out one automatic benefit of rust b/c of Cargo (not rust), but even that is suspect b/c Rust can ship with dynamic libraries if configured to do so.
In this case, the credibility and benefits are clearer if they said "Static binary". This is all just context. If you see a benefit to that headline, that's ok.
being written in rust is clear disadvantage for web-app.
Was going to point that out, as it is irrelevant, but I have seen something far worse.
> 7. How does gitdot make money?
> We don't.
> We are fortunate enough to have raised a small pre-seed round from investors we are happy to call friends, and also to be at a point in our lives where we are financially independent and in good health.
The founders of Artifact said the same thing. They had no plan to make money and once they used their own capital they decided not to continue running it anymore (no-one else wanted to invest in Artifact).
So it is only a matter of time until they eventually need to make money, raise money or shut it down.
I suspect the fact that Github and Gitlab use ruby backends is a significant (although by no means the only) factor in the slowness of Github and Gitlab. So yes, being written in a language that is better suited for high performance at scale is, potentially, an advantage. Although if it is vibe coded, there's a decent chance there are architectural problems that offset the advantage gained from the choice in language.
GitHub used to be great when the frontend too was in ruby, the react rework might've got somebody promoted but performance was never the same.
GitHub is so data heavy and there's so little reactivity that it should really be server side rendered.
The frontend was Ruby?? Are you sure?
Not literally. And I would hardly say it was a matter of language superiority. I love Ruby myself. But Github was a lot simpler when it was still just a Rails app.
But Rails was SSR by default, and most of the frontend was just Embedded Ruby (ERB) template files all over the place. And way back when, it was even relatively common to use Javascript supersets like CoffeeScript[1] and Opal[2]. The latter being Ruby that compiled to JS.
[1]: https://coffeescript.org/ [2]: https://opalrb.com/
Yes, standard rails. Rails does not ship with components out of the box and the most prominent component system for rails was built and is maintained by GitHub. They have been moving to React for the last few years though, it seems to be more about hiring and ergonomics rather than capability.
As in rendered server-side.
Reports of Ruby slowness are often exaggerated. Around the time GH was built that was certainly true, but in the ways that matter Ruby is more than fast enough nowadays, even at scale. (Shopify is a rails monolith, as is intercom and a bunch of other massive services) Compute is/was pretty cheap and the economics of ROR mean that it's ultimately not that expensive to run. I think GH's slowness is a mixture of mismanagement and issues on the frontend.
But for sure a systems language is going to be far faster on paper and Rails is far from perfect and does have some performance foot guns you need to avoid. And yeah, architecture is everything.
Yeah, rust programmers are the new software vegans.
They claim it is better just because of the language, ignoring the features gap, the size of the team developing and supporting the software and not having solved any issue with the software they compete against.
And to be clear, this in not in favour of GH, it is against the mentality that the programming language makes better products and programmers.
I was very excited about Rust prior to the LLM-era. I never managed to dive deep into it due to the lack of time, but was really planning to.
Nowadays when everyone and their dog are either vibe-coding with Rust or constantly shouting about it's superiority, I've lost any interest in the language. I'm learning Zig.
Feel the same way about the intersection of Rust evangelists and vibe coders. The amount of undeserved arrogance by some hardcore believers is toxic to their culture. I am learning Rust, because there is merit to the language itself, and there are some useful and quality codebases written in it. But it's imperfect in various ways, most of all the evangelists attacking other languages as inferior and unsafe, and the increasingly common massive vibe-coded monstrosities. It's not that I'm against the use of LLMs, I'm against bad engineering practices and unmaintainable code.
Zig, on the other hand, is a breath of fresh air. There's so much to love about it, including language design that values clarity and simplicity, and the cross-compiler which is how I got started on it, by using Zig as a better build system for C projects. Their move away from GitHub and vibe-coded contributions is also commendable, it's more reason I trust their sensible judgement.
Interesting choice when LLMs remove one of the biggest barriers to entry for Rust which is you have to know almost all the rules to reliably make valid changes to Rust programs (which also helps LLMs at inference time when they make mistakes).
>when everyone and their dog are either vibe-coding with Rust or constantly shouting about it's superiority, I've lost any interest in the language
None of this makes Rust worse as a language
What? This doesn't make sense, how is it Rust's fault if people are being lazy and tribal?
It's not the fault of the language itself. But the behaviour gives people bad vibes, and they don't want to associate with the community anymore.
Keep in mind. Learning a language usually also means you interact with the people in the ecosystem at some point.
The community seems normal? Take this popular thread for example:
https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/1tcrmjs/rewrite_bun_i...
Many seems to be very skeptical and concerned about Bun being vibecoded.
The rest of the subreddit is basically people showing off their work.
It's not about if the entire community is weird. But that a few vocal people doing something becomes the first impression of the ecosystem. Which is turning people off from exploring further, as you can see in this thread.
You can make the case that if something like this turns you off from diving deeper into the language you probably weren't that motivated to begin with. But it is a noticable effect. This post isn't the first time I see it either. Rust has become a meme amongst my colleagues because things keep popping up with "Build with Rust" before mentioning anything of substance of the project. The phrase "Did you know Rust is memory safe?" is also a running joke in my IRL dev surroundings now.
I mean, yeah... but I bet if Zig gets really popular, it will attract similarly toxic weirdoes.
Also if we're only judging whole communities by their toxic minorities, then... I'm so sorry Americans reading this, I've got some bad news for you, lol
What I'm trying to say is, it's best to try <a thing> for yourself, and see if it fits your preferences, rather than letting others stop you from exploring.
> What I'm trying to say is, it's best to try <a thing> for yourself, and see if it fits your preferences, rather than letting others stop you from exploring.
Yes, that is the rational thing to do. I don't think anybody disagrees with that. But that's not how a lot of people go throughout their day. There are a gazillion languages to pick up nowadays, and I think many experienced devs only have a casual interest in picking up a new one. If you've been interested in picking up a system language, I can easily see why you would steer away from Rust towards Zig.
And just to clarify here. You shouldn't judge an entire community based on their toxic minority. But as a community, you can't also ignore your toxic minority. Like it or not, they do represent you. And they do scare away potential newcomers who aren't already sold on the language.
I don't think anyone's disagreeing with you that it's "best", but people are stubborn, irrational beings at heart.
> if people are being lazy and tribal?
I have seen developers and managers having an attitude of arrogance just because they happen to code in a specific language. They also look down upon other developers just because they happen to code in some other language. Evangelism combined with arrogance is toxic.
Rust is definitely a hotbed for the kind of smells/red flags I used to associate with C++ Template Demons. "I typed every line myself" ok and?
> I used to associate with C++ Template Demons.
Reminds me of a colleague who rewrote the entire standard template library from scratch to demonstrate his uber-templating knowledge. He was the only one who could debug problems in that. The rest of us were ordinary c++ coders.
I've always found juniors to be the most prone to being "clever". Writing complex things for the sake of it. And it's one of the things I think you need to get over if you want to be considered medior/senior. A senior that loves being clever in an actual product is dangerous. Keep that stuff for hobby projects.
At a web agency I used to work at this was definitely a thing we had to teach the juniors. Whatever you built now is going to end up in maintenance with a support team that doesn't have as deep of an understanding of the project. Being overly clever now is going to be a pain in the ass later.
"Keep It Simple, Stupid" is an important skill for a professional.
> They claim it is better just because of the language
I mean, it clearly is better (in certain contexts), see e.g. https://blog.google/security/rust-in-android-move-fast-fix-t...
> We adopted Rust for its security and are seeing a 1000x reduction in memory safety vulnerability density compared to Android’s C and C++ code. But the biggest surprise was Rust's impact on software delivery. With Rust changes having a 4x lower rollback rate and spending 25% less time in code review, the safer path is now also the faster one.
I can imagine LLM can, or will be able to, write safe C too. At least safer than people can.
Bugs are not only related to memory and a program cannot be considered safe Just because it got rid of pointers, malloc and free.
If you really think that switching language is the main driver to get safe programs, the you are on the list of people replaceable by LLMs.
Othewise you have to understand that architettural chioces, concurrency, (weak) cryptographic function and user stupidity have a significant impact, no matter what language you use. Memory management is just a part of the problem.
> If you really think that switching language is the main driver to get safe programs [...]
I didn't write that.
> [...] the you are on the list of people replaceable by LLMs.
lol, love a high quality discussion
> Memory management is just a part of the problem.
Sure, then using Rust is a step forward, because that's one less thing you have to worry about. Seat belts don't save all people, but a car equipped with seat belts is - on average - safer than a car without seat belts.
It would be nice if they mentioned anyhting at all they are doing to implement security features. instead of leaning onf Rust which does absolutely nothing in that regard. just look owasp top 10 and observe it has nothing to do with memory safety. and thats just a top 10 of things.
only for very few companies, memory safety issues are a thing. most of those dont use rust because it lacks tooling and certification paths -_-.
rust is like AI and cloud. heavily marketed, not bad, but not as good as whats on the box -_-. it makes life usually harder for a lot of aspects (ofc cleverly avoid in publications about it -_-)
Yeah, this is what the people who have parroted "Rust is safe" have achieved. Rust is not "safe" in the broader sense of the word, only "memory safe". You have to implement the security yourself!
You assume that its used to show advantage, but we are on a technical forum and for me, as an engineer, its always interesting what language or tech was used to create a project.
"Written in Rust" signals some common attributes.
Fast, Safe, Lightweight, Statically linked (plop a precompiled binary in ~/.local/bin and run it), few/shallow dependencies, senior developers, "Done" software.
Now, certainly no guarantees, enough counter-examples, I know. And attributes that one can get with anything from PHP via Javascript to Lisp as well. Some attributes have stronger correlation than others too.
But, in general, "rust" has a (much) higher chance of meeting these attributes. I care about those attributes above anything else.
I'm happy to label myself a Rust fanboy, but
> few/shallow dependencies
is just flat-out wrong. There's (sadly) a big culture of sprawling, deep dependencies in the Rust community. There are of course many counterexamples too, but it's definitely not correct that Rust signals the virtue you refer to.
(Incidentally, the misguided idea among some that as long as a dependency isn't through FFI, it doesn't count as a dependency, is one of the things I dislike the most about Rust culture. That, and pervasive bundling.)
> the misguided idea among some that as long as a dependency isn't through FFI, it doesn't count as a dependency, is one of the things I dislike the most about Rust culture
I have not heard that idea a single time. There's definitely the idea that FFI dependencies "count more" / add more baggage (because there's a bigger risk that the build fails, it's harder to investigate memory safety, ...). Absolutely not that a non-FFI dependency "does not count".
Sadly I couldn't find an example at the moment. We're probably better off striking my parenthetical claim then :)
Probably my reference is tainting this then. I come from Perl, PHP (both of which, at that time, had nonexisting or terrible package managing - CPAN, PEAR), then Ruby, with gems and now Python, Typescript/Javascript. Starting with Ruby, I've developed in communities that heavily depend on deep dependency trees.
For me, the discipline of shallow dependencies, no-dependencies etc, was new when I came to rust.
Sure, if I pull in something like Rocket, it comes with dependencies, that have dependencies that have dependencies. But Rocket is one of the more extreme examples I know of, and even that is nowhere near the depth of a tree that common (not extreme) npm frameworks/libraries come with. Before yarn I sometimes had node-module trees that went over 50 levels deep.
The Python community doesn't have this extreme deep dependencies, but in Python it is far more common to "from foo import bar" in both libraries and in applications than to write a few hundred lines of code yourself. The Django and "lean" flask, or "simple" cli apps I worked with and on, quite commonly have hundreds of dependencies (many of which are dependencies of dependencies etc).
Within that context, rust community is far more conservative. Many of the dependencies that I use have one, maybe two of their own deps. Many none. And it's more common - IME - to see libraries that have just one level of deps - the libs a lib depends on, itself won't have deps.
Though, I guess, C or even C++ community, lacking OOTB, common and easy dependency management like cargo, will be far more conservative even.
Rather than being "flat out wrong", I'd say it very much depends (pun intended) on where you come from and compare rust with.
Oh stop being silly. Yes, the programming language is technically irrelevant in that they’re all Turing complete.
In reality, the programming language tells you all kinds of subtle things: probabilities about the way the software will feel to use, how stable it’s likely to be, how fast, what the author is likely to focus on.
I found one of the best jobs of my life in 2015 by asking “who’s doing interesting things in Atlanta in Go?” Not because I was uncompromisingly settled on Go, but because in 2015, using Go (often) connoted a certain approach, a certain type of engineering, a certain constellation of values.
So please stop pretending the whole gestalt of programming languages and their communities don’t deeply affect the resulting software.
(I say this with no unkindness intended, mostly to all of hackernews)
> but because in 2015, using Go (often) connoted a certain approach, a certain type of engineering, a certain constellation of values
So called "The vibe". And the vibe emanating from Rust is sometimes unbearable. Like claiming the main feature of the project is that it's written in Rust.
It’s one of the first questions people will ask so it’s probably worthwhile to mention it. I didn’t get the impression they did so just because they thought rust was some kind of flex.
If the first thing people ask about your offering is "what programming language did you use when you made this," your offering is probably not that interesting.
The offering in question is "A better GitHub" so you are correct. That is an actual quote from the FAQ [0] by the way.
In comparison CodeBerg [1] and SourceHut [2] both offer Git hosting but don't merely describe themselves as "GitHub but X".
[0] https://gitdot.io/faq
[1] https://codeberg.org/
[2] https://sourcehut.org/
Or maybe your audience is developers who might want to contribute to the project, and would prefer to work in some languages more than others.
If your primary audience is people who want to contribute to it, then the fun of hacking on it is more impactful than the benefit of the offering itself. That's not bad at all! But it also does not suggest that the offering itself is particularly impactful.
Not necessarily. It isn't at all unusual to use something because it is useful and also want to be able to make improvements to it.
This drives me nuts too and your comment is justified.
Recently encountered someone going 'full crab' with rust & vk trying to chase perf, they were not happy when some thoughtfully written modern JS beat the brakes off it even with the overhead of the browser (~2000fps vs 750)
This kind of thoughtless "its rust!!!" shit causes people who don't know better to waste time chasing their tails. Claude seems to encourage it :\
You can only do so if it is "written in Zig"
/s, I love zig, but I'm consistently surprised of how popular any post containing zig in the title makes it to the front page almost daily, doesn't happen with any other language.
But did you know Rust is memory safe?!
When I see that, my first thought is that there are a bunch of features missing from the original.
Actually it almost serves like an anti-features to me.
Well, it probably is an advantage over the same product written in say C++, all other variables held the same - just not a big one.
It is a killer feature. It tells me I can easily compile and edit the code myself.
It is an advantage
Imagine if someone says, written in in plain and pure JavaScript. Is there a difference? What kind of promise it tells about the software?
This.
Saying it’s better than GitHub is a bit of a stretch right now, when it doesn’t even support mobile and looks like the stylesheets failed to load
I agree that such a claim is a stretch, however, I personally love the minimalist look (it has its own charm). Saying it 'looks like the stylesheets failed to load' is your own exaggeration.
> Saying it 'looks like the stylesheets failed to load' is your own exaggeration
On mobile I literally refreshed the page because I thought my wi-fi broke... Maybe it looks a bit better on desktop
looks bad on desktop too, most content being uncentered (spread at the edges of the screen).
If I've learned anything about AI recently, it's that AI has just as much trouble centering things consistently as human designers.
Interesting stuff! I really like the design philosophy you're applying here, where the browser/web behaviour is actually part of the UX. Pretty rare for web application nowadays!
If I could make one suggestion, I really like the old MacOS "inspector" pattern. Basically a consistent way to get meta-information about any "thing" the user chooses to inspect. Your right sidebar is going towards that, but it would need some work to make it more consistent between views.
GitHub's UI has these weird meta-states/restrictions that are so badly explained in the UI they feel like bugs. Each line gets a [...] menu in github which lets you see the blame/spawn a issue linking to it/get a permalink/etc. It's a totally different UI in the diff view, and then totally different again if you're looking at a comment referencing a line in a diff AND different if it's referencing a permalink to a line in a file, even if it's the same code that would be in that diff!
I want the UI to have obvious "nouns". If the UI is showing me a line of code, even if it's in a diff view, let me "inspect" it and get the exact same meta-info + tools I get for lines of code anywhere. It's "a line", not a weird meta state of "a line, but you're in the comment of a PR linking to this line".
Same concept applies to comments/commits/authors/etc. If the UI shows me a username, I should be able to pull up a "who is that again" inspector. Going into github's commit view, clicking on a name... and being sent to a filtered list of that person's commits makes zero sense to me because this is the ONLY place where that happens. That behaviour should be a "recent commits" button inside some "user inspector".
thank you!
i'm not aware of the old macOS inspector pattern, but this sounds super interesting and i agree with the critique of inconsistency in github's behavior.
this reminds me a tad of superhuman's right panel too which auto-populates upon writing a time (or typing a name i believe?), which is a feature i do find personally useful as well.
i haven't thought seriously about hovers on nouns quite yet, but this is giving me much to munch on.
thank you sincerely this is dope.
I like it a lot.
The UI is a bit odd at first, and there are obvious things that need to be fixed (like the invisible input fields), but by the time I had created an account, I'd gotten used to it, and I appreciate how incredibly fast it is.
I'm a bit worried about this:
> How does gitdot make money? > We don't. > We are fortunate enough to have raised a small pre-seed > round from investors (...)
I'd rather know now how you're making money than find out in three years when I'm invested in the platform.
I like the terminal aesthetics but please, for accessibility's sake, make input boxes look more like input boxes and buttons look like buttons.
thank you for the feedback, yeah i've been going and trimming a few places where i think my own tendencies have gone a bit too far.
i will also say on accessibility, i recognize the site is a bit too small font in general — and will fix it soon.
I would humbly suggest that a reasonable site should assume that the user has set the comfortable font size in the browser, and make all other font sizes in percentages, or using rem units.
Generally probably shouldn’t try to innovate in too many places at once
we are well aware and duly noted. thank you for the feedback
Interesting. It seems that perhaps a good mental model for solutions like this is to start federating to each other rather than to centralize and create replacement walled gardens. Mastodon style activity feeds might be a good starting point for this.
The value of Github is not just hosting projects and issue tracking but the notion that it's probably the largest professional network of developers that can interact with each other, create pull requests and issues on each other's projects, etc. There are many GH alternatives but very few with the same global network of essentially almost every developer out there.
Instead of everybody creating new accounts on each other's not quite Github clones with only a handful of users, why not improve on the state of the art here and allow people to use their user account from a server of their choice and create a proper alternative to Github?
That's an awesome idea and one that's already being worked on![0]
I really hope it works out, would bring so many benefits.
[0] https://codeberg.org/ForgeFed/forgefed
I see a lot of people trying to capitalize on GitHub's recent failings, and I feel like everyone trying to shoot their shot in this space is missing one key aspect: Git is a terrible TERRIBLE piece of software.
I have spent a considerable amount of time learning git, not because I wanted to, but because someone else in my team didn't and inevitably t-boned our repository with a proverbial freight train running commands they didn't understand. It is absolutely unacceptable for a program designed EXACTLY for the purpose of maintaining a history and backup of the evolution of a program to be so unwieldy and occasionally dangerous to use. We can absolutely do better than Git.
Not asking to be pokey, genuinely curious because I have heard similar from a consistent couple camps... what stack you develop in and what VCS do you prefer?
Ironically, Git is my preferred VCS. I have used Perforce Helix, Mercurial, and SVN. It is the best of the worst. I don't think anyone in the space has made a truly great product.
Painting with a broad brush I feel like the people who still don't like git either worked with mercurial and liked it more, want to be sort of hipster or counter culture and use fossil, or work in microsoft shops or game dev shops.
Sample size is small but it's been consistent for me over the past 20 years.
I like p4/helix for the locking when working on something like a game where you need assets to be handled more carefully since there's a lot of binary floating around but despise the company and the sales / licensing games. I had a rep just ignore me completely when I emailed wanting to cancel and ended up having to go find the director of the sales org on linkedin and get him involved (and it was cancelled within 24 hours).
This sounds like a process + human problem, not a technology problem. To me, it sounds like your team lacks discipline and competence. Sorry bud, going to categorically disagree with your sentiment that git is terrible.
Exactly. Git is an amazing piece of software. If a team can’t use Git, which is still the simplest and most reliable way to track project history, I wouldn’t have much confidence in their ability to produce quality software.
Well, for a more positive comment (since everything seems to be negative - and nobody brought that up) the site is very fast. In fact pretty much everything changes instantly when i click on stuff, which is very rare. The only exception seems to be when looking at some files with a long history (not sure why the history needs to be displayed by default though).
That said, from a UX perspective, personally i prefer Forgejo - which isn't that much slower either (judging from Codeberg, it isn't instant but it is fast enough to feel "fast").
Love the idea of someone tackling this space in Rust, but please just make a normal UI, I have no idea what I am looking at.
I personally prefer the GitDot UI over the bloated corporate style UIs that all feel the same
Agree!
"Better" is a strong word without proven analysis or some kind of statistic, that honestly caught me off-guard as when you state that I expect something like a product like Bitbucket, obviously as you can imagine. Either way, cool project.
What's the differentiation against Forgejo going to be?
forgejo is a pretty great piece of software.
a lot of this we've really come to know as we dug into both it, gittea, gitlab, and all of their internals.
i think the short answer as to a differentiator is design. our goal's to just build the best product possible, one that we'd love to use and one that we hope developers do too.
some of the stuff we've been thinking about include: stacked diffs as PR primitive, a Nix-based CI (that's reproducible and locally testible), a super simple and intuitive bug tracker, and just making the site super duper fast and pleasant to use.
that is to say, there is a _lot_ of surface area that a software forge covers and i think there's a lot of room to make things better.
hope that's clear enough, apologies for any ambiguities, we do NOT have all the answers quite yet haha
I'm a bit confused, aren't the Forgejo people trying to build the "best product possible", too? And there's more of them, and they have funding, and… between 2 good forges or 1 great one, I rather have 1 great one… I guess you're not interested in joining them because it's not Rust?
thank you both for asking.
i think the honest answer here is autonomy. the freedom to choose our own tech stack, our own product priorities, and our own design.
i'll also admit that i don't know forgejo's own priorities as well as i do our own, and that is negligence that we're due to correct. maybe they are perfectly aligned and it does make sense for us to join forces.
but just as with any FOSS project, they have the freedom to choose what they work on as do we, and i intend on respecting that.
> i think there's a lot of room to make things better
I think the question is why not try to make the other FOSS forges better instead of reinventing the wheel.
Is jj a first class citizen?
First of all, kudos for the work.
Personally I dont care if it is written in Rust or anything else. What I do care is stability, security and features.
I would have enhanced the dashboard a little bit. I understand most of the work was done in the backend. But dashboard is what folks see first. and might lead someone incorrectly judging the work just by looking at that.
It seems to be a trend of HN lately.
Downvote me into oblivion or whatever: It's not relevant to me in the slightest whether you built it in Rust or not, or even Python, Go, Java, Node, PHP etc. There is lots of great and terrible, fast and slow software written in each. OP might only have 3 months of programming experience for all I know.
Why is "made with Rust" any more relevant than "made with Go" to an end user of a software product? It just doesn't matter.
> It just doesn't matter.
Pre LLMs it did matter, not rust specifically but the language itself. It meant the difference between asking the developer for a feature/fix and getting it done myself if needed.
Now not so much with LLMs, but it does signal something about the development, deployment and supply chain risks involved.
A better Github, without 99% of the features that Github has.
I mean, to be fair, a lot of the reason I use Gitea is that I don't want the other 99%.
that's why it's better!
haha
I built https://GitFar.com to clone my private repos off GitHub and host them without their limits using 100%-GitHub compatible APIs! It is stateless, and only uses system tools like rg and git! Gives me complete freedom which I can truly enjoy pairing it with ZFS subvolumes tuned for the different content types in my repos (text, images, video, etc.)!
Nothing that claimed to be a better GitHub was even GitHub enough to begin with.
GitFar an internal a drop-in replacement for our devs to just change the hostname and keep using exactly the same APIs with exactly the same request and response shapes with extensions delivered through request and response headers!
Will you open source it?
The minimal look feels very refreshing, and yet it's not disorienting like many minimal web git UIs are in my experience; I actually feel like I know how to navigate this thing. Site feels very snappy too, especially with those instantly loading file previews when you hover. Congrats!
thank you! of all things in this launch, i was the most anxious about the design as it is admittedly the most different.
glad to hear the positive feedback :)
It seems like the site is currently getting hugged so I can't look but I'm glad someone is trying to achieve a more minimalistic take on the UX of a software forge. It seems like an area with good room for improvement.
the hn hug is real indeed, hopefully this link is fine. a bit wordy, but goes into quite a lot of the thinking that went into the design: https://gitdot.io/designs/gitdot-designed-by-developers
Big fan of the design! Different but easy to get a hand of. Having /profile also be linked on the homepage with the other main pages for ease of navigation would be nice, the profile link at the bottom feels like it clashes with the rest of the UI to my eyes.
No ssh?????? I am fine with everything but this is really but no ssh??? I am out will check back once basic features are here.
Would be interested in a comparison with https://sourcehut.org/ (which has a comparable minimal aesthetic, but also has the deep benefit of being FOSS.
Gitdot is FOSS as well from my understanding.
What’s that line about vegetarians? Like how do you know if someone’s a vegetarian? They’ll tell you. This, but Rust.
Talking about loading animations etc. and then choosing a hard to read font and font size.
Kinda ironic isn't it?
Feels weird to ship a website without mobile support in this day. The desktop version looks nice though
Didn't work for me even when I chose to see the desktop site in my mobile browser :/
it is based off a minimum pixel as of now, apologies.
the overall reason why we didn't ship a mobile site is that code is inherently very hard to read on mobile
and i think to do that properly, you have to design explicitly for it. (and that is not, in fact, something that i do want to vibe code)
At least it would be reasonable to show a message like "Sorry, no mobile support yet".
As a banner or something, maybe. But I'd much rather see a broken-looking site on mobile than see nothing at all on mobile.
In the same category: websites that display nothing but a splash screen "This site requires Internet Explorer X" or whatever. Don't nanny me, just feed my browser the HTML! Whether my browser can render it properly is my problem, not yours.
[flagged]
We shouldn't trust the new project. Right from [1] you linked to:
> The problems I kept running into:
> - I'm lazy.
That should tell you all you need to know about this super hype new fantastic GitHub written in Rust ! ! ! !
What's wrong with pivoting until you PMF?
Maybe ask the people who buy in early but are left behind by the pivot
what makes you think they are abandoned? Maybe they are in-use...? Maybe the landscape shifted to where niche tools like that aren't monetizable?
The landing page is still a "join the waitlist" placeholder and there hasn't been a single commit since one week after they announced it, ten months ago. Together with the entire repo and the ShowHN post itself being vibed through and through, it seems apparent that putting any amount of human effort into that project was never on the agenda. Which naturally leads one to wonder, what makes this project different?
it's YC we are talking about, everything is vibed through.
1. It's unfinished 2. Textbook slop dump and run
we can see one big initial push, not too suspect. Then a few superficial updates, and then nothing for months.
Unfinished, broken, and ostentiably abandond due to being an unmaintaible nightmare as vibeslop tends to be.
This is unfair, and the vibe-coded swipe is unnecessary. Why would anyone continue working on a project if it's not seeing any adoption or interest? Many large successful apps were borne out of sharp pivots - Slack comes to mind.
I would perhaps be less inclined to make a point out of the vibe coding if they had not literally put "anti-AI" in the title as a key point of their marketing (although Dang removed it). I think it's absolutely fair to point out the hypocrisy and disingenuity of marketing a vibe-coded product in that way.
It is entirely reasonable that you could use AI to build a product with no AI features. Why is that hypocritical? Especially for a product like a GitHub -- it's a reasonable take to say "AI is useful tool to produce code, but I don't want 851 random "Ask AI!" adornments all over my website when I just want to read the code."
unfortunate name: very similar to Godot at passing glance. my brain already stumbles going back and forth between seeing LLVM and LLM, IP (Internet protocol) and IP (Intellectual property). Don't me started on X vs X vs X vs ...
I do like that it reinforces this rule of thumb:
This is really interesting. Especially as its open source and I really liked the UI design of it.
I was thinking about creating my own git forge given the unreliability of Github and I wouldn't be able to create just at the moment incredibly reliable software like git forge although I could use AI to create a minimalist piece of software, I didn't because I didn't want to create yet another AI slop fighting another AI slop (github/gitlab).
Forejo is incredible but I have always wanted to get more alternatives in this field.
Much thanks for making it. I have signed up and I have high hopes for it too and I will try to either self host this on my servers or gitdot.io as well as Github
I recommend making a small community in matrix (preferred), fluxer.gg, discord etc. as I'd like to join it.
PS: small personal thing that I have made which helps in making communities: https://mirror.forum
I am definitely interested in gitdot.io! This seems incredible
I wish nothing but the best for you folks. Gonna create a local copy of the source code of gitdot.io right now!
Thanks for open-sourcing the efforts too. I really appreciate it :-D The software is so nice!
I genuinely hope that you guys and the project blows up and if you guys might ever hire a junior dev, I hope you all could remember me as the world right now needed such software that you have made!! :-D (Although I am more interested in managing servers/golang but that's because rust is hard to learn as a beginner but that's different topic but I like rust's ideas too and rust is a great/preferred language with golang for this type of service :-D)
Thanks for the support, we really appreciate it. We want to create/support communities within the app in the future (via issues, etc) but ya it's a good idea to form some channels.
It might be a bit difficult to self-host at the moment (as we don't have a good documentation to do so) but you can try and let us know how it goes.
Seems interesting an I'll take more of a peek after work, but one thing that stood out to me is the only way back to the home page after navigating to a repo is the back button. Going back to the home page via the back button also doesn't retain that "new" was selected. But I agree with others, I do like the simplicity of the site.
this hn thread is interesting as it feels like i'm getting to revisit a lot of decisions i've made in the design haha.
i debated this for a while too, some of my thinking for how it is is that i wanted the focus of a repository page to be _the repository_. so as much as we can, trim things that might detract.
it was also done with the intention that it's actually pretty rare for a user to find or explore repositories on github (more likely you find them here on hn or on twitter), so had the restraint of really trying _not_ to make gitdot anything like social media.
but thank you nonetheless for the feedback, i'll revisit it proper and see if i can make this more intuitive.
I think I can understand that reasoning. I do have a tendency to explore, especially at the start since it gives me a view of what the site can already do, cause I wouldn't want to run into issues with my own projects without knowing of the possible limitations ahead of time.
If anything since the keyboard shortcut already exists, you could always put it in little cursor menu at the bottom of the screen. But yeah up to you, I look forward to your progress.
I’m not sure I agree with all of your takes either. For example, I’m not anti-AI for coding, so that immediately made me click away. I’m glad I read the comments though because I think the take of “not using your code to train AI” makes a lot more sense.
But, I wanted to say thanks for posting this and being really open in the comments. It’s hard to get so much feedback so quickly. It’s a firehouse of criticism that’s hard to deal with.
You’re handling it well.
thank you mbreese, i know folks can be mean and i also recognize where they're coming from (we are certainly far from perfect), but this comment is nice to read.
thank you for the empathy.
you can press "h" to go back to homepage :)
It is ... problematic ... to lead with "anti-AI" and then bury terms like "judicious in our use of it" in the fine print.
IMO a team like yours can either:
* Use LLMs, in which case you aren't "anti-AI".
* Not use LLMs currently, but the non-use is not due to following a principle, in which case you aren't "anti-AI".
* Not use LLMs and promise never to do so.
I'm happy you are trying something new. But you hurt yourself by engaging in something very old: disingenuity.
(edits for presentation and grammar)
I've taken that bit out of the title for the time being, since it was causing confusion.
yeah this has been pointed out a few times, will revise the copytext later but will keep it up for the duration of the post.
hope our sentiment is clearer in the comments that i've made, i think i've made the mistake of phrasing here with the "anti", i'll revisit it.
edit: dang has removed it, apologies for the confusion i caused, that was my mistake.
Thanks, I appreciate it.
I think you're in an interesting space where there's a real opportunity to create something fresh. When people are actively looking for alternatives it will be easier to break out of the established norms.
What does anti-AI mean? Don't really see anything about it in the design doc except "no AI copilot".
thank you kiro! (i feel you may be slightly miffed about the AWS IDE taking your name haha)
i replied in a separate comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48452052 but to reiterate: 1) no AI copilot and 2) no training or selling of your data.
but overall, the general ethos is to focus on the problems that AI is introducing as of now and how we can help solve them, rather than just build AI features with abandon assuming that they're good.
some stuff that we do know about: the influx of slop PRs / slop issues on popular repositories, losing agency our own of code as we AI generates more, and privacy/sovereignty of code.
i've talked a bit about stacked diffs which we do see as one concrete stab in that direction, but a lot here is to be admittedly sketched out.
Tangled (https://tangled.org) is the next social coding platform to believe in imo because
- no more silo-ing, moat BS, by design - they are working on vouching which is becoming more important in the age of AI PRs
This is a violation of Git's trademark, and your usage of it is expressly prohibited by their policy.
https://git-scm.com/about/trademark
> [...] you may not use any of the Marks as a syllable in a new word or as part of a portmanteau (e.g., "Gitalicious", "Gitpedia") used as a mark for a third-party product or service.
> Please be aware that GitHub and GitLab are exceptions to this Policy because they are subject to explicit licensing arrangements that pre-date, and thus take precedence, over this Policy.
You might've known that if you hadn't vibe-launched this while for some reason marketing it as anti-AI, but here we are in a world where basic research is a dead art.
I’d love to hear an IP lawyer weigh in on this, because I’ve never heard of this kind of thing before. It doesn’t seem correct that you can use trademark alone like this to extend beyond the actual word used in the trademark. Maybe it’s from licensing or something, ie maybe if a product uses the actual git product, then the git license means you can’t use the name as part of a word.
thank you both for chiming in.
i will be honest and say that we didn't do our due diligence here (we simply assumed that it would be okay to do so, given the existence of GitHub, GitLab, GitKraken, GitButler, and so forth).
it does look like from digging in: https://public-inbox.org/git/20170202022655.2jwvudhvo4hmueaw...
that portmanteaus are prohibited by the policy that the Git PLC enforces, which as Jeff notes in his email above, does grant incumbent advantages to grandfathered names (e.g., GitHub, GitLab).
we'll reach out to the conservancy, ask for explicit permission, and if not, rebrand.
In my opinion (which may be worth little), by using "git" in your product's name today you are also locking onto that technology. So if an another or better VCS comes along (like jj) that you want to embrace it could be harder. (Kind of like how Bitbucket betted wrongly on hg, then later added and switched to git).
Trademark law is ridiculously slanted in favour of existing rightsholders. The most famous example I know of is "McSleep Inn", which was sued by McDonalds and forced to change their name. I think that ruling was complete bullshit, because Mc is so generic and usually a prime factor of trademark law is whether the businesses operate in similar domains, but it goes to show how broad the protections can be. Something like "GitFoo", which is explicitly being used specifically on a site for hosting Git repositories, doesn't stand a chance in hell, and rightfully so because this is actually trying to take advantage of Git's name to market their product.
They might have been sued, but did they change the name just to settle out of court? McDonald’s failed to maintain the trademark on “Big Mac” in Europe when it actually went to a court room https://www.theguardian.com/business/article/2024/jun/05/big...
They did not settle, hence my usage of the wording "ruling" and "forced to change".
> For the reasons given the Court finds and concludes that (1) McDonald's is entitled to enforce its family of marks that are characterized by the combination of the prefix "Mc" with a generic word; (2) the name McSleep Inn is likely to cause an appreciable number of the public to be confused by believing that McSleep Inn is sponsored, associated, affiliated, connected, or endorsed by McDonald's; and (3) the adoption and use by Quality International of the name McSleep Inn was a deliberate attempt to benefit by the good will and reputation of McDonald's. Therefore, the Court will find trademark infringement, unfair competition, and dilution under the Illinois statute (Ill.Rev.Stat. Ch. 140, § 22).
https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp/6...
I suppose it's not surprising that Europe is less favorable to frivolous trademark claims made by American corporations than America is.
I mean OK, valid, and they really should get on it.
But you are squinting really hard if you equate "programmers not being good lawyers" with "they obviously vibe-launched the product".
If you look at any other details of this it is very clearly vibecoded.
Git is open source/public domain. Trademarks don't apply to it.
> Git is open source/public domain. Trademarks don't apply to it.
Public domain and open source are two completely unrelated concepts. If open source were public domain, you could not license usage of it (MIT, GPL, etc.). What is the point of confidently asserting something you're completely ignorant about as though it were factual?
That’s not right. You can very much apply trademarks to open-source software. See for example Mozilla Firefox. Also, open-source and public domain are not the same thing. Finally, git is GPL.
Why does it have to be a website? Why merely "CLI-inspired" and not actually CLIs?
hrm. so i guess if the question is why not just make a software forge that is _only_ based in the CLI, the answer i think is convenience.
it's very convenient to be sent a link (or find it on hacker news) and to be able to click around files, read the README, understand what a repository is about without having to clone it and open locally. plus -- if you only need a barebones git server with no web UI, git provides this by default.
if the question is, will you build a CLI / what will be in it? the answer is yes, we do have a barebones CLI for auth as of now, do envision things like managing issues / PRs from the CLI, but want to make sure that strike the right balance there.
i think TUIs can be deceptively hard to build well, and admittedly, it hasn't been a priority for us quite yet.
Removes a barrier of entry if you can look at it from a browser instead of installing a CLI/TUI.
Don't try to make me install a random program if I can view it in my sandboxed browser safely.
Also, browsers have greasemonkey to help me personalize websites easily. TUIs don't.
More vibe-coded trash.
Appreciate the effort you put into building and getting this product live. It's already more than most do even with LLMs!
However, I think the value proposition should be much higher than simply "GitHub in Rust". GitHub is still a great, complex product, despite its recent problems. There should be some sort of x10 (or at least x5) improvement that will make people _consider_ migrating.
> 5. What features will gitdot not have?
> AI.
> We view AI as an implementation detail — and do not think that using it is necessarily good.
> In fact, we think it makes many products worse by acting as a bandaid for poor design.
> That isn’t to say we are blind to it, but that we will be judicious in our use of it instead.
Not sure I follow. What feature are the developers referring to? I understand that AI will power tools that may or may not fit a particular use case. How is AI a feature and what does it mean to be anti-AI?
I don't get that. https://gitdot.io/bkdevs/gitdot/gitdot-api/CLAUDE.md they use agent files in every repo directory for the gitdot code.
I'm honestly lost for words over how you can write something like this while the web app's source code is clearly heavily integrated with Claude Code.
https://gitdot.io/bkdevs/gitdot/files
yeah thanks for digging in, this was a bit ambiguous.
so take this to mean - 1) no AI copilot in the app and 2) no training on your data nor selling of it.
our take on AI is that we should focus on building tools that help address its limitations; one of the things we're particularly keen on is building stacked diffs into reviews as a primitive, so it's easier to review a large AI-generated (or assisted) PR. (e.g., diff 1 for API changes, diff 2 for backend wireup, diff 3 for front-end changes)
i think to do that, we're going to try and hook into the subscriptions that people already have and are paying for: Claude, Codex, rather than package our own, but some of that is a bit hacky to do.
hope that's clearer and thank you for asking
That's not really anti-AI. Anti-AI would mean avoiding it as a value regardless of practicality.
That sounds more like anti-enshittification.
AI is rapidly becoming a synonym for enshittification. It can be a little aggravating. I am trying to judiciously use terms like "agent" or "LLM" so I can avoid just lazily saying "AI", which is often a pejorative term now.
I wouldn’t claim boldly„better GitHub” in the tile while having „Mobile support to come”.
Aspecially as now adding responsive mobile takes 15 min (or less).
So like: not to hijack thread -- but is there any way to post about what you've built on HN without making people angry if its vibe coded? What's the etiquette there because I have a thingy I am going to post soon (open source, non commerical) and don't really want to be ripped apart by HN. I am a software engineer but doubt that matters if it's all vibe coded.
If you aren't willing to be ripped apart then posting isn't the right move, simple as that. Public critique is part of sharing your work in any space, HN included.
Be honest and transparent about who you are what you have and what you did. If it took you a year of solid development, it'll probably look like it did. If it took you 15 minutes in Claude... well it probably looks like it did too.
If you are YC backed then say "YC Winter 2026" or whatever in your title frankly - people will work it out anyway.
They said it was a better GitHub, which is a very high bar (despite the regular complaints about GitHub). They also said it was anti-AI, despite it being vibe-coded.
Also, know your competitive space. Posting on HN is like pitching - not knowing about your competitors is not really going to work - you need an answer for, for example, why someone picks Gitdot over SourceHut.
this is very good advice thanks a lot. I will make sure to do this. Cheers.
the domain is hard to speak... "git dot io" refers to git.io so you'll have to call it "git dot dot io"
I'd say it's still better than "dotnet"
I see "anti-AI" in the description and I wonder what that entails. Then I try to look at one of those tending links and all I encounter is "Mobile support to come.", and mobile is my primary device for checking things out. I want to stay positive about the future if this project, but Idk what to think here.
A lot of fuss that needs to be chiseled out first. There's an idiom that is followed a bit too black and white, but the grey is grey.
No loading animation, but my screen jitters while loading in stuff. My internet speed is fine, so it's a performance/bug issue.
I also did not initially understand the UI, but that'll come as I use it more
yeah the site isn't perfect.
my fixation here is to make everything load instant, but that is dependent on server latencies, which right now is admittedly slow as we only have one server in the US.
but thank you for giving it a shot nonetheless!
Developers can champion their preferred language all they want, whether it's Rust, dirt, or grime. What matters to me is having viable alternative platforms and seeing active experimentation with new projects and features.
Looking forward to seeing even more features, gitdot.
>As of now, all repositories are free, but we do envision charging for private repositories for teams in the future.
Please don’t do this.
Charge a fair price, in fact find a fair price and double it.
I don’t want a free GitHub clone, I want one that works.
How about 50$
50 private repos, 50GBs of git LFS storage. Add collaborators for free.
Actually respond to customers. At this level you only need 1000 paying customers to make it worth while for 2 developers.
Would you pledge in a crowd-funding campaign to build something like this?
You'd want something that doesn't allow training on private repos, so ideally not a private company that can change owners and managers and hence policies over time.
It's an interesting business case - open source website, revenue generating with some type of "open" business structure.
Its first repos could be of itself.
I had this idea for enabling pull requests to be in "pipelines" with each request crowd-funded (as an option) to thereby entice action. A small split could return to the main site itself for upkeep.
Or full blown encrypted repos where only you have the key.
Or, if we go a step further you pay a licensing fee for Gitdot and self host it.
The cookie jar of AI training data is very hard to resist even if it’s a non profit
I think 50$ is the minimum you could charge and still have responsive customer support.
Oxenai is private but their vcs is open source including the server, so you could self host it for free and use it with other people. The vcs itself is a little bit like git but with native large fial support
I could be wrong but I think besides being able to self host for free you can also pay for something where they help you set it up and stuff
Something nifty also that you can do is that instead of them training on your data they enable you to train your own models on it and download the weights.
Definitely agreed its hard to trust anything you cant audit 100%. I think a non profit structured the right way would probably be pretty trustworthy not to do anything egregious like training on your data though. Or some way maybe to make the thing transparent so you know what happens with the data and you can basically audit the company somehow. I dont know if you would need to go as far as encrypted repos, that seems a little too paranoid but that would be a really interesting idea for a company although the target audience is probably limited
"much better" in what way
It is vibe coded in Rust. :)
> What is a bit unique is: 1) we built it in Rust
The first unique characteristic is that it was built in Rust? Why does it matter from a user perspective? I was expecting the first point to be something that would convince me to check it out.
Unless the goal is to find people to collaborate on building the software. I got a bit confused.
Looking good regardless :)
fair critique. i'll refrain from it in the future.
but i will say that the point of our post isn't to really sell anyone here or on anything. we kinda know that our product as-is isn't ready to use at real scale (we lack issues, prs, ci, gotta fix a lot of bugs, etc.)
we did just want to sincerely share what we built. and rust is a part of that, we chose it cause we wanted to learn it and we then quickly found out that we really liked it too.
While we're critiquing, the demographics that I'm part of has trouble taking someone seriously who is too lazy or sloppy to use the Shift key and complete punctutation.
I hate that too, of course, but as long as it doesn't creep into the actual product or website itself, it doesn't really matter.
At least they aren't using five digit years...
And after looking at the site more, I have to say I'm pretty interested. It is a nice-feeling site. There's a few UI oddities that need to have the rough edges sanded off, but I very much like the main approach.
totally agree we should not tollerate lack of shift key use and punctuation
what demographic is that?
Me, on an international team, as learned that flawless english sentences as a metric about as silly as dress codes in business. I'll take my california laidback-ness to your stuffy NYC banker rules.
The demographics I'm part of have trouble taking seriously people who yell at kids who live two blocks away when someone from one block away wanders onto the yard the kids are playing in.
guess im a joke to you then
I worry that what they’re trying to say is that it was vibe coded but vibe coded in a language with a pretty solid linter.
What an irony that those exact safety guarantees that made it attractive are now a detriment because they make the project smell like AI.
> Unless the goal is to find people to collaborate on building the software.
Surely it is at least in part. We're talking about the announcement of a new open source project that isn't ready to use yet which would presumably enjoy people helping make it work for them, and a new startup around that open source project that is likely to be hiring in the future (or even maybe right now? Didn't check).
> Why does it matter from a user perspective
It implies that there was likely a small degree of rigour in the construction... not a large one (very little software has that)... and not a guarantee... but likely more than the abysmally small average in the software world.
I am tired of "built in Rust" as an argument, you are spot on, it should not matter. But you are shooting right at Rust culture here haha
And I'm tired of the "tired of 'built in Rust'" arguments because it also shouldn't matter if someone happens to describe their project that you didn't have to go out of your way to talk about in a way that bothers you. But I'm shooting right at the "tired of 'built in Rust'" culture here.
You can take these arguments to an unbounded level of depth; someone can be tired of my responses to the responses to so me someone happening to care about something different than them. It's all equally silly, and if you're convinced that your level of depth is reasonable but the others aren't, I'd highly recommend trying to think about why you're so confident that your opinion is important but ones that come after aren't, because it's very unclear to anyone who doesn't already agree with you, and that's usually a sign that there's no point in saying it at all.
is anyone else absolutely sick of hearing about rust?
Yeah, what I did was reading about it instead, like, on purpose.
Fair point is actually “less is les here.” It’s more of an alternative to Gitea than to GitHub, where managing Git is almost an afterthought. Or maybe you haven’t used GitHub recently. But sorry you cannot cal this better GitHub.
Can't import repositories starting with uppercase :?
Did you check if I name my project 朽木?
Lookout - next they will rewrite the color blue in Rust and claim advantages.
Congrats on shipping this. Self-hosted + open source is exactly the combination I keep reaching for these days. Out of curiosity, how heavy is it to run — could it run comfortably on an M1 Mac (16GB RAM)?
The UI isn't very attractive; I’d like to see the font size increased, as my eyesight has deteriorated significantly from working at a computer for long periods.
I agree with you for the font size, but other than that I really like the minimal UI
Did you guys just make my own git forge plans useless? This looks great!
I was gonna call mine EOL and I already bought the domain eol.sh...then again, I could just do mine in TypeScript and launch it anyway.
It’s weird that “written in Rust” is some sort of headline feature.
It’s like “baby on board” stickers on cars - why are you telling me that?
Then again Rust is so complex maybe it’s worth self congratulations.
Does it have a CLI like github? Does it follow GIT? I made an account and did not migrate my repos, as I'd like to test this before moving in... Thanks in advance!
Nice job! Please consider providing an oci (docker/etc) container image (or if you do already, make it easier to find!)
Nice. Also https://codex-infinity.com can do git hosting but isn’t open source
Good work. However minimal doesn't mean better. Nothing wrong in showcasing the work but make sure to add the appropriate description.
Most people would agree that Github isn't good software anymore.
Most people would also agree that building a better Github is not a super easy two-person task.
fwiw when I opened the site, my fans spun up and firefox slowed a lot. No idea what it's doing, but it's definitely using a ton of cpu.
Interesting design.
Why rewrite from scratch? Wouldn't it be advantageous to start from an existing forge (there are many these days) and add a new UI?
The UI is polarising, for sure. But, I will celebrate anyone who takes on the hard task of creating a new code forge. Best of luck!
Github is fine. It just has serious issues with the huge amount of traffic.
I bet they will sort it out, and is most likely a top priority.
The hard part of GitHub is scalability
From quickly reading their source this morning, it does not seem to scale well. on-disk git repo's, and postgres for everything else (with objects on cloudflareR2 or GCP?)
> 7. How does gitdot make money?
> We don't.
This cannot last forever. What's the plan when it runs out?
There is a dozen CLAUDE.md in the gitdot source. The "Anti-AI" in your title seems a bit disingenuous.
I absolutely love the minimalist UI.
I see code reviews is in the roadmap, I can't wait to try it.
Feels like one can just copy the UI and use it for forgejo. It would get something similar very quickly, and avoid handling all the difficult stuff I guess.
Big Brother seems to be built in to us humans.
git itself is decentralised - all repos are equal. Mr T designed it that way because ... well that's all that was needed for Linux kernel development back in the day and it still seems to work. The management stuff can be managed quite well via email and some choice socials. Obviously that nonsense cannot possibly scale to the size of your enterprise thingies!
Yet again we have a better Big Brother than Big Brother ... this time with Rust, yum!
a better GitHub? what's better? The fact that is built in Rust isn't a killer feature nor something someone needs.
Nit: the verification code check shouldn't be case sensitive.
Paul & Mikkel work at GitHub and are trying to offload traffic from gh
no one cares what language the program is written in
The CLI-inspired UI is the most interesting part here.
I honestly do not see the point of all this. it has a font size problem for one, I can't see the edge it's confusing to use.
I love the design. Clean and refreshing - you start at the left and every sub element goes to the right. Like a file browser. And the commit screen is dense but super readable. I would move the summary column from the right of the README to the left of the README on the /home screen (and call /home the /README).
Loading files is very slow but I assume that's because HN is hammering the server.
I am not a believer in negative advertising. So I don't give a poop you are anti-ai. Or "better" than Github (better for who??). Just imply you are a code forge thats made for serious developers who need something engineered to be fast and reliable.
I wish you the best of luck, I can see Linear coming out with git repos after coming out with a diff reader. I have a suspicion there's space for many code forges in the market as you build out more features, especially if you lean into your products hacker-y-ness
Ooh, it's the same thing I'm building.
This looks really cool!
I came to these comments to see if other people were annoyed by the "written in Rust" comment. Glad it's not just me
> Install gitdot-cli to push and clone private repos
Hmmm... no. Why should I? Just let me use git.
Just one minor piece of feedback that's unlikely to be a priority. I cannot fully navigate when browsing in a terminal browser (chawan in my case, haven't tried with w3m or lynx). For example the "h" keymap for going home does not work.
That said though, one of my pet peeves around browsing Github Web from the terminal was having to click "skip to content" just to get the body. So you definitely delivered there (after having read your design post). Good luck with the rest of the year.
oh wow i have not thought about terminal browsers in a while (i used to use one back in the day in college haha).
yeah, that admittedly is not priority, but thanks for taking the time to check it out.
the design looks neat. + for hexagonal pattern on the backend - that fits perfectly!
thanks!
FAQ point 5 is pure comedy.
I mean, no offence but nothing is more of a signal of marketing fluff to me than saying “built in Rust” or “anti-AI”
Tell us why we should care outside of the marketing fluff - these aren’t highlights - if anything they are quite off putting.
Your project needs to stand on its own actual merits.
Critique over, congratulations on launching something or building something anyway.
But what makes this different? And why have you chosen that philosophy - outside of marketing fluff
This project looks awesome. I’ve really enjoyed your blogs about the design process and learnings. Brave to jump into Rust while learning a new domain but very commendable. Wish I had a close programmer friend to do this stuff with, sounds like a great asset to have such great chemistry.
You seem to be experienced devs, so I’m sure you already know, but don’t listen to the contrarians on HN. They’ll suck the life out of you because it’s not 100% the way they like it.
i want to view desktop on my mobile… and it wont lettt meeeee
Too bad it's written in Rust so I won't use it.
Was excited until I found out this is a YC company. And a stereotypical one by the sound of it ("pivot hell" blah blah).
If you're sell is being an unenshittified alternative to github, just give it time
“Written in X”. Every time I look elsewhere when I see it. When is people starting to think about features instead of “it’s better because I rewrote it in X!!”
"we built it in rust" is not a differentiator - especially when the first thing that happens when i click a repo is "mobile not supported"
lol. really stretching the word "better"
that UI is way too opinionated
I hate that when we scroll through a codebase files, it changes the file we are hovering, I'd rather having to click to see the file
Yes, this particular UX is poor. It's not intuitive that clicking the filename has different behavior from clicking elsewhere in the file's row. Expanding the row inline needs a leading widget.
This particular issue is solved in GitHub proper, and derives from the Windows 95 tree view widget [1], which I seem to remember from Windows 3.x but can't find a screenshot.
The hover behavior is just not an intuitive or accessible default. I can't imagine someone being able to use this if they have a hard time clicking without moving the mouse. It also wastes resources fetching file/directory contents while the user is moving the cursor to a predetermined file they presumably wish to open.
[1]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/winauto/syst...
thank you both for the feedback, i'm revisiting it now and i do see what the both of you are illustrating.
i think i will get rid of the change on hover, it is a distraction and perhaps was just my ambition to show people how fast we load.
edit: fixed
If you click the file row (not the filename as that will navigate to file page), then hovering over other files won't change the preview.
this thing looks slopped together in day. I don't even know what I'm looking at when I go to the home page. Good luck with it, but I think you have a VERY long road ahead of you.
Personally if I wanted to leave Github, I would just move over to Gitlab.
Sorry but the name is too hard to say. At least it's not as bad as Forgejo
Maybe it’s the HN effect but /files takes a while to load.
Personally while I appreciate something not being AI slop, writing something in Rust has no meaning to me.
yeah this is because we're currently (very temporarily) hosting things in NFS and git stat operations are very slow since they assume a fast file FS. we'll fix that in a few.
and yeahhhh, i do try to be very non-marketing in all that i say, but something about the title made me a bit ambitious, apologies.
> anti-AI
> mobile support to come
Cmon lol. Give opus 20min and it will give you a mobile site throw in a better-looking desktop site for fun.
I signed up and the code email went to spam. A quick look at the DNS seemed to show you were lacking DKIM and DMARC records.
If I'm not mistaken about that, you should remedy that to ensure email providers don't dump your emails to spam.
Thanks for flagging, we were missing DMARC, now added
Bit odd it was missing at all. Makes me wonder how well the core infrastructure you're building on is understood, and how trustworthy any of this really is. If all I'm getting is some vibeslop, with zero expertise or skill added, even basic stuff like this, why shouldnt I just vibe my own better version tailored to my needs exactly? Same headaches as with your app (though likely less give what's on display), only now I dont pay you to give me headaches and I retain control.
The software was never the moat. The skills and experience crystalised within it was, and remains, the product.
We've built a better SpaceX! says kid with cardboard rocket in the backyard. In Rust we trust!
Common man, you're not even 5% of a Github replacement. Don't act like one. You've built a Git web UI with accounts, the easy part.
> Building software is still hard
You don't say.
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
"Don't be snarky."
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
Obviously this is a project at an early stage and the title expresses what they're working on, not a claim to 100% feature parity.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It's pretty honest, some times you have to be.
There are many ways to be honest, and some of them are within the site guidelines. Commenters should be honest in those ways.
Thanks for reminding me, I appreciate it.
However there is justice for commenting poorly, there doesn't seem to be justice for posting lies and deceit, which is borderline a serial case here(?).
That question does comes up quite a bit, so I try to occasionally post an in-depth explanation. Maybe I'll do that here.
We can answer the question by rephrasing it. I would put it this way: "is it ok to be wrong on HN"? The key change is to replace charged words like "lies" and "deceit" with the neutral word "wrong".
People do lie and deceive, but to tell that apart from just plain being-wrong requires knowing someone's intent, and this is not something that moderators (or readers in general) can do. Even courts of law have a hard time doing that! HN comments don't contain nearly enough information to decide it. You would have to have a mind reader [1].
Worse, readers are far too quick to assume lies, deceit, etc., in other commenters that they happen to dislike or disagree with. The internet is rife with this, as we all know. Most of these insinuations are imaginary—we are all too inclined to attribute disingenuousness to the other side. One can easily see this by looking at how the same accusations are made against one's own side.
Once the question has been rephrased in this way, it answers itself: of course it's ok to be wrong on HN. How could it not be? Most of us are mostly wrong about most things. Moreover, being wrong is part of eventually getting something right. Curious conversation, which HN exists for, often involves mistakes, and sometimes the mistakes (or seeming mistakes) turn out to be creative.
Even if we decided it was not ok to be wrong, how would we enforce that? We don't have a truth meter [2].
As we have neither a mind reader nor a truth meter, we can't base moderation on anything that requires knowing people's intent or knowing the truth about things. We need criteria that can be decided from people's observable behavior on the site. As I sometimes put it, we can only moderate by effects [3].
That's why HN's guidelines are they way they are (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) - there's nothing in there which requires us to know what someone's intent is, nor whether they are right or wrong on a topic. At least I hope there isn't!
What about the truth, then - do we care about it at all? Of course we do. It's critical! But working out what's true vs. what's false is the province of the community, not the mods. It's the commenters' job to do that, e.g. by answering bad arguments with better ones and false information with true. And they should do this within the site guidelines, e.g. by being respectful and curious rather than aggressive and accusatory.
The moderators' job is to hold the container for this or (if you like) to keep the playing field fair. This isn't possible in any complete way - there are far too many factors pushing things into messy, unsatisfying places. But we do what we can.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
> We've built a better SpaceX!
Well actually, spacex owned xai is now coding AI in C while earlier it was rust; I guess with the attitude that a language good enough to control rockets is fine for ai.
> Mobile support to come.
In 2026 not being mobile first is a bit of a disappointment to be honest