Hacker News Reader

Comment by dc_giant | Hacker News Reader

Cool idea but why python?! Rust please and I’m all ears.

The author is also the creator of the textual Python library for creating TUIs. The performance benefits of Rust don't seem very useful in a tool where you spend a few seconds typing in a prompt and then 90% of your time is spent waiting. As long as the UI is responsive when typing there wouldn't be much of a difference.

Didn’t know that. Good reason then of course. But I do notice these sort of differences. Codex feels way better than Claude code to me for example.

I tried Toad and to me it feels ridiculously slow and laggy. Switching between input and output (ALT+up/down) for example just lags, I can notice the transition. The whole UI lags. It's no wonder, it's python. Simply the wrong language for this, sorry.

Yeah it feels slow and laggy to me too and I'm not on an old laptop. Running on a M3 Macbook Pro here. I definitely notice the difference between using something like Ghostty (Rust based - super fast) and Toad (Python).

It doesn't really make sense to compare the performance of Ghostty, a terminal emulator, with Toad, a TUI. Also Ghostty is written in Zig, not Rust.

It's obviously way slower though. Also the point stands, it's written in a low-level, performance-oriented language. The author of Toad could have written it in Rust, Zig, C++, etc, but chose Python instead. He valued ease of development versus performance and the result is we get a laggy terminal.

I know for a fact that Textual can generate an entire frame in less than a 60th of a second. Any lag you see has nothing to do with the choice of language. A TUI just doesn’t require that much number crunching to use a low level language.

I’d be interesting in knowing what platform and terminal you observed the lag, when testing Toad.

It is quite literally instantaneous on my 5 year old laptop. Whatever you are seeing isn't due to the choice of Python.

Maybe it's something on my setup then. I notice some delay even though it's by no means huge but noticable. For me these things add up, another example is pane resizing in tmux. I like things snappy, but it's kind of an OCD thing I guess.

The creator of Toad, made a TUI framework in Python (Textual). What is so special about Rust, aside from it being blazingly fast and compiled, that you want from it?

Safety, performance, avoiding python dependency hell.

Sure, to each their own. No one forced you to use it, you have a thing called free will, and you can gladly use it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com