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Comment by aumerle | Hacker News Reader

There is no performance cost, there is a performance gain: https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/performance/#throughput

Kitty was slower than alacritty and foot as per author's earlier input latency tests.

https://mastodon.online/@YaLTeR/110837121102628111

That's because kitty's default settings introduce a few ms of latency deliberately to save energy, see details at: https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/performance/#keyboard-to-scr...

If you want to do a fair comparison to alacritty you need to set those to the recommended values for best latency.

Still slower than alacritty according to https://beuke.org/terminal-latency/

Also not really cross-platform, contrary to what's indicated in the first word of its github description, and the owner is kind of an ass about it https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues/6481.

Cross platform does not automatically mean something supports all platforms, nothing does.

But it should support at least more than one platform. And it's disputable what exactly one considers as a platform, or just a flavor of some platform.

It does support more than one platform. It supports linux and MacOS, which is two, plus probably half a dozen more flavors of BSD.

As said, it depends on the definition of platform for this case. All I see is support of a bunch of flavors of one platform, namely POSIX, unixoids, or how you want to call it. Yes, they are different desktop-platforms, but the purpose of this software is still limited to one specific environment. Or to give a different perspective, nobody would call it cross-platform, just because it can run with Gnome and KDE, under X11 and Wayland.

And I'm curious how much adaption happens for each OS really. Are there specific changes for MacOS and BSD, outside of some paths for configurations?

MacOS will have to be different as the GUI layer is not X11 or anything like it.

Wayland is also not X11.

Just curious, but is it really so hard for people here to think outside the box?

To me, it seems like the people thinking inside the box are those that claim that cross-platform necessarily implies it runs on Windows.

It's probably fair to say that an application with native Wayland and X11 support is multiplatform. I can understand somebody disputing that, but certainly Linux and MacOS are different platforms. They don't even share executable formats.

The heavy lifting is done by glfw though.

The entire point of POSIX is that, if you only use what it defines, your program automatically becomes cross-platform, because it will run on several Unices, as well as other systems (like Haiku).

And kitty is much faster according to this: https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues/2701#issuecomment...

Also typometer based measurements also on Linux. Shrug.

This was 2 and a half year ago, maybe alacritty improved since then.

Maybe, on the other hand: the link you posted was to a benchmark using kitty 0.31, since then it had an all new escape code parser using SIMD vector CPU instructions that sped it up by 2x. https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/changelog/#cheetah-speed

I do think this wasn't excluded by the benchmarks from the link I posted

Edit: actually it was, cheetah seems to come with 0.33, not 0.31, and benchmarks were done in 0.31. It would be interesting to run them with 0.33.

Anything that supports more than one platform is cross-platform. The world doesn't revolve around Windows.

> Also not really cross-platform [...]

How is this relevant to this conversation?

The author replied with the same effort as the person who reported the issue. You kinda need to do this as a maintainer if you don't want to drawn under low quality reports and burn all your energy. I'm sure lucasjinreal would have gotten a kinder answer if they took time to phrase their issue ("demand", at this point, also misguided) nicely.

It's not really, I just remembered wanting to try out this terminal emulator and being quite surprised that something actively advertised as cross-platform didn't support Windows.

I agree that the person posting the issue wasn't really doing it in a diplomatic way, but in the end, the result is the same. I think it's disingenuous to actively advertise something as cross-platform, without even specifying which platforms are actually supported (even if yes, technically it's cross-platform)

> without even specifying which platforms are actually supported

The first line of the README (ok, second line if you include the title) is "See the kitty website" with a link, and on the site the top menu has a "cross platform" entry which then lists "Linux, MacOS, Various BSDs".

It seems like a stretch to classify that as disingenuous.

So I have to click twice, change domains once in order to get this information.

It's actually easier to just check the releases for prebuilt windows binaries. I think that's telling.

> So I have to click twice, change domains

If you start from the github source code repo, instead of starting from the official website.

I guess.

If you're determined to be disappointed, I suppose you'll find a way. Whatever.

That's only throughput, but on latency it's significantly slower than alacritty, xterm, st etc according to all measurements I've seen.

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