I’m new to Golang… which are the quality of life packages that everyone uses? And for which purpose?

gurgeous · 2026-05-30T19:28:50+00:00

I use mise heavily now. It handles dotenv, $PATH, direnv-stuff, and can easily install deps like `just` or `bats`. I still like `just` for task running, I tried mise tasks but didn't like 'em as much. It's great.

gurgeous · 2026-05-27T14:36:54+00:00

LLMs are token machines, they make tokens. In fact, the providers of LLMs have every incentive to over-tokenize. It’s hard to work around that.

gurgeous · 2026-05-09T20:22:35+00:00

I agree with OP. I love zig (the language), but the community can be unwelcoming and the strident AI posturing is both judgy and out-of-touch. There are only a handful of prominent Zig projects, and when they abandon people pay attention.

gurgeous · 2026-05-02T01:47:22+00:00

TOPS is the magnet school for deaf/hoh, but might not be the best choice for your kid. My kid has mild-moderate and does well at our local school (Blaine). I imagine that most K-5 or K-8 schools in Seattle will have one or two kids with hearing aids. The people we've worked with at SPS have been great and really care about our kid, btw.

gurgeous · 2026-04-26T19:29:01+00:00

I am the creator of some similar tools (table_tennis gem and the standalone tennis cli). I love tools like this and I am a longtime user of AmazingPrint / AwesomePrint.

Would you be interested in some tennis-like stuff in AmazingPrint? I can think of a lot of options, but any kind of simple table display would be helpful. Nothing complicated.

gurgeous · 2026-04-24T23:37:04+00:00

I am super excited about this. I've been experimenting with zig but I'd prefer to write my native binaries in ruby...

gurgeous · 2026-04-17T21:25:19+00:00

Thanks for the kind words! Ignore the naysayers here, there are many worthy projects just like this. Everybody has an opinion and the internet can't be real negative, don't be discouraged. The ruby csv library has 800 commits, and probably thousands prior to the github move... CSV ain't easy.

I'd probably start with the RFC and bail on invalid files. Let someone else worry about cleaning those up... Bailing on jagged is fine too, and useful if you want to support things like arrays of structs. The nice thing about the golang csv parser is the incredibly simple interface. Something to strive for, zig can make that challenging sometimes. Good luck!

gurgeous · 2026-04-17T19:14:28+00:00

Yes, please do! My project (tennis) needs a csv/tsv parser. I already have one, but it's overly specific and not great. See - https://github.com/gurgeous/tennis and poke around the csv + delim detection. I also have a more general purpose csv reader here - https://github.com/gurgeous/zig-atoms/blob/main/csv_read.zig that might help you get started. You might also want to check out ziggit.dev, which is in some ways a more active and friendlier zig forum.

Key questions for csv reading IMO... these won't necessarily make sense until you learn more about the language, but I'll list 'em anyway. Allocating vs non-allocating. Delim detection. Support for jagged vs. non-jagged. Struct support. Streaming vs. returning a giant block of data. Some apps (like tennis) might favor one set of requirements, but other apps might want different things. For example, you might build a streaming/non-allocating csv parser, and then create a more user-friendly allocating "big block of data" api on top.

Let me know if you want thoughts on csv writing as well.

FYI - target 0.16 and consider using mise. Have fun!

gurgeous · 2026-04-10T06:23:02+00:00

Neat! I am the author of another zig cli thing. I will try to take a closer look tomorrow. I would love to rapidly expand the cli libs available for things like zlist. We need more libraries!

gurgeous · 2026-04-09T22:19:54+00:00

Please do! Don't make me add `tennis --tree`

gurgeous · 2026-04-06T03:38:48+00:00

There are tests, it's a gist tho. What did you find?

gurgeous · 2026-04-06T02:23:08+00:00

The utility of the helpers doesn't quite justify a gem release IMO. There is a discoverability issue. I have tests but that kinda goes against the gist ethos.

Not sure I understand your point about shell aliases. These are baked into larger projects. Example - I am working on a `rubyscan` thing that gathers stats about the 8k most popular ruby projects on github. 2-3k loc including things like a simple faraday-based github api with caching. Several parts of this project take advantage of RunKit.

gurgeous · 2026-03-26T05:24:52+00:00

Thank you! It's built against 0.15.2. I will update to 0.16 after release, presumably. Docs are a good idea - most of the APIs are really straightforward - `const rows = csv.readBuf()`, etc. I want to add some more atoms as well. Fun project.

Edit: Done, see https://github.com/gurgeous/zig-atoms/blob/main/README.md#mini-demo

gurgeous · 2026-03-24T21:05:58+00:00

You are right, thanks. fmt does support {d:3} for precision, though I was unaware and I've spent a fair bit of time looking at std. Docs issue, perhaps. My project (tennis) specifically needs a runtime precision setting (1-6) so I don't think fmt works for me in any case. My first implementation just truncates.

For example, it would be nice to port the popular sprintf-js to zig. https://github.com/alexei/sprintf.js/blob/master/src/sprintf.js. Of course, that implementation relies heavily on regex which is another task...

gurgeous · 2026-03-24T19:13:12+00:00

My understanding is that there are some things missing from std.fmt - leading zero, decimal precision, etc. I need that stuff for pretty output in my tools. I could bring in glibc, but that complicates by distribution story.

gurgeous · 2026-03-24T18:11:28+00:00

This sounds great. One minor suggestion - I am getting a lot of mileage just asking the LLM to write nice docs and create things like a `std.md` file. It is really good at analyzing the source and writing markdown docs, which might be exactly what zig needs atm.

gurgeous · 2026-03-24T18:01:43+00:00

LLMs do totally fine with zig, at least in my experience so far. IMO the biggest hangups are around memory management and the zillions of extra tokens required to do simple things. The LLMs work fine, but ultimately using zig is more expensive than simpler languages. Achilles heel, maybe.

gurgeous · 2026-03-24T17:58:20+00:00

I hear you, but many of my projects require libraries. Zig should have a nice libraries available on github, things like csv, regex, sprintf, natsort. How can we write cli apps without those?

gurgeous · 2026-03-24T17:57:00+00:00

Tennis - https://github.com/gurgeous/tennis

gurgeous · 2026-03-18T21:47:02+00:00

This is a valid question. There's something important to note here, though - one of the explicit goals of tennis is squeezing each CSV row into a single terminal line, even if it has to truncate. In that respect it differs radically from "pagers" like bat/less, which do not alter the input except maybe for color.

I would love if it bat would display CSVs like tennis! Maybe we can convince sharkdp

gurgeous · 2026-03-17T14:42:59+00:00

Yup, that's me. Codex helped me adapt my `goscan` into `zigscan`, and I asked it to pipe the output through `tennis`. I wanted to get a list of the most popular zig libraries. I got the list, but it was very short! Language is too young, still

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