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Comment by hparadiz | Hacker News Reader

this is what I've been waiting for

a low level language. please no more scripting language TUIs!

Rust, a language with affine types, generics, lifetimes, deep static analysis, hygienic macros, etc is not low-level. It's nearly as high-level as Haskell (without HKTs though).

It just does not rely on GC and allows to manage resources efficiently. This efficiency is partly due to its being so high-level.

While I agree on the fact that it allows to manage resources efficiently, I don't agree on the fact the efficency derives from it being high-level; from a purely tecnical standpoint, i could skim off 2-3MB from the memory footprint by writing the code in pure C, as there are some unused parts of Rust's std that cannot be removed without recompiling std.

This is obv only a technical talk, as writing an AI TUI in pure C would be rather... ehhh

That's why I said "part of its efficiency". Rust can do RAII, can optimize things more aggressively because of no aliasing ever in safe code, and because of known lifetimes, it can offer fearless concurrency™. Rust can also support highly optimized data representations (see how Optional works, or other ADTs, etc) which languages like Haskell, to say nothing of Python, cannot offer because of GC and boxing.

Lower-level languages like Zig or even Go, to say nothing of C, lack many of the high-level language features that power this efficiency.

Agreed, Rust is way more expressive than people give it credit for.

There has been no reason to wait... Codex is written in rust.

-- So is deepseek-tui.

Forgot to add an open source qualifier. I use codex lol

Codex is also opensource.

I don't really want something owned by a company for my local stuff. I'd prefer it be small and minimalistic. Maybe in the future I'll change my mind and it will be more like a browser but for now I wanna keep it small and local.

Thanks! I don't think that the only advantages are being open and lightweight, but you can actually find some more interesting features such as Ollama support, integrated Prompts (in order to compete with superpowers), git worktrees integration, and so on

Isn’t codex in rust?

yes.

How come the official codex install instructions say use npm install?

(I just rebuilt my sandbox vm a few days ago….)

Or are there two separate codex clients?

https://developers.openai.com/codex/cli

The one from npm is signed by OpenAI, which means computer use from the CLI. The brew distribution requires using the Codex app for computer use.

Thanks Apple.

Because people are crazy, usage of npm for installing binaries is quite common unfortunately.

So …. do I understand it right? openai, one of the hottest companies on the planet right now, with very deep pockets, distribute their official rust cli via the … public npm repo?

Maybe they consider npm-install an improvement over curl-pipe-bash?

Yes.

There is also homebrew install.

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