Why we built Lightpanda in Zig
31 comments
·December 5, 2025gorjusborg
azaras
What are you developing in?
drnick1
I have seen this time and time again: first complain that C/C++ are too complex or lack feature X, new language is proposed, then sooner or later people find out that's it's not fast, expressive, flexible enough or imposes a nonstandard way of doing things (Rust), then back to C/C++ and few years after the cycle repeats.
loxodrome
I just want Zig with classes, Zig++. :(
motoboi
I'm starting to form an image of the zig community: people that like to write and reason, nice typography, videogame inspired visuals.
lvl155
This is actually a great summary of Zig. I am with the author: I am too old and stupid to use Rust properly. Whenever I watch someone like Gjengset write Rust, I realize I am doing it wrong.
websiteapi
has there ever been a project that became popular and/or successful because of its programming language? does it really matter to the end user what language it's in if it works well?
karmakaze
Yes. I don't think Linux would have succeeded if written in a language other than C. Today is a different story.
Yes it matters to me as an end user if my web browser is more or less likely to have vulnerabilities in it. Choice of programming language has an impact on that. It doesn't have to be Rust, I'd use a browser written in Pony.
If I were making something that had to be low-level and not have security bugs, my statement would be:
> I’m not smart enough to build a big multi-threaded project in a manual memory-managed language that doesn't have vulnerabilities. I want help from the language & compiler.
The size and longevity of the team matters a lot too. The larger it gets the more problematic it is to keep the bugs out.
gorjusborg
There's a big part of me that agrees with your implied conclusion, that it shouldn't matter.
On the other hand, I've found that core decisions like language ecosystem choice can be a good leading indicator of other seemingly unrelated decisions.
When I see someone choose a tool that I think is extremely well suited for a purpose, it makes me curious to see what else we agree on.
The Oven team, the ones who created the Bun runtime, is a good example for me. I think Zig is probably the best compromise out there right now, for my sensibilities. The Oven folks, who chose to use Zig to implement Bun, _also_ made a lot of product decisions I really agree with.
karmakaze
This is one of my assessments/red-flags when interviewing with a company. Their tech stack/choices is a reflection of their engineering culture. If they chose Zig or Rust, I'd want to hear why that was a better choice than using a gc'd language.
rudedogg
The language tends to affect everything, but to give a quick Developer example there’s Zed. Developers use it because it’s fast. Same with Sublime Text.
Your criticism makes more sense with products targeting non-technical users though. But IMO tech choices have cascading effects. I won’t buy a vehicle if the infotainment software sucks, and that’s the 2nd largest purchase I’ll ever make.
websiteapi
zed is a great example. most people use vscode, that is javascript. which ai code editors are built from scratch that aren't forked vscode?
null
rudedogg
Just Zed (if AI features are a requirement) as far as I know.
But to elaborate, they’ve found a niche simply by using Rust and rendering the GUI in a performant way on the GPU. I’m not saying performance is the only thing, but for a chunk of people it is something they care about.
sroussey
I hate all infotainment systems, so I’m still on a car from 22 years ago — with no screen and ratting me out on how I drive to unknown entities.
If I had the optional GPS screen from 22yr ago, I think I would have ripped it out and replaced it a bunch of times or just bought a new car.
I’m curious to try the new iDrive 10. We will see…
null
cgh
https://paulgraham.com/avg.html
Paul Graham is one of the founders of Y Combinator, the company that hosts Hacker News.
femiagbabiaka
I think I'll take the side of no (as long as it's fast/safe/good) and also I never find the reasoning in these language comparisons to be that compelling anyways. A "why we like $FOO" is better than "why $FOO works better/is better for us than $BAR", since the latter is almost always going to be incomplete.
CooCooCaCha
This post is aimed at developers and hackernews is a technically focused forum. So I care as a developer.
If language doesn’t matter then why not go build something in fortran or brainfuck?
pklausler
I really don't understand the disdain for Fortran on HN. While it's not the most well-defined or portable programming language in the world, it does its job pretty well for those who need it, and has more actively maintained implementations than any language I can think of apart from C.
grayhatter
> If language doesn’t matter then why not go build something in fortran or brainfuck?
Because if you're getting lunch, and someone suggests Burgers, Sushi, or Casu martzu. Only two are actually reasonable.
Yes, yes, if I'm allergic to shellfish, I might want to make sure I have an EpiPen before getting sushi. But that doesn't mean it's a meaningful problem.
null
observationist
I'd like to see a setup with Lightpanda feeding a local/private AI, with content rendered post-curation. You could filter out all the garbage at the intake, instead of doing all the plug-ins, extensions, add-ons, DNS and whackamole arms race.
AI researchers need to hurry up and invent the next big paradigm shift so AI on your phone is as good as SoTA bots, so we can stay ahead of the enshittification curve.
Awesome software - I've been meaning to build a crawler and this does the trick.
francisbouvier
Author and founder here. Thank you!
null
mustpax
I feel like I’m missing something. How do people justify the security implications of manual memory management when building a publicly accessible web service with Zig?
ridiculous_leke
In practice aren't such services behind a reverse proxy/WAF? The other day I found an endpoint in the wild outputting a DB table. I tried fuzzing it to gather more evidence of a SQL injection vuln but my attempts were flagged by AWS WAF.
Years ago, when I initially picked up Rust, I loved it. It does a lot of things right. At the same time, though, I knew there was a possibility of it going wrong in two opposite directions:
1. Developers balked at being required to take on the cognitive load required to allow GC-less memory management
2. Developers wore their ability to take on that cognitive load as a badge of honor, despite it not being in their best interest
I eventually came to the decision to stop developing in Rust, despite its popularity. It is really cool that its creators pulled it off. It was quite an achievement, given how different it was when it came out. I think that if I had to implement a critical library I would consider using Rust for it, but as a general programming language I want something that allows me to focus my mental facilities on the complexities of the actual problem domain, and I felt that it was too often too difficult to do that with Rust.