[HN Gopher] Show HN: Gitdot - A better GitHub. Open-source, writ...
___________________________________________________________________
Show HN: Gitdot - A better GitHub. Open-source, written in Rust
What works now: user signups, org creations, private/public repos,
and importing GitHub repositories (both as read-only mirrors and
full migrations). So basically, you can create, push and pull to a
repo, but we don't have many features quite yet (issues, PRs, CI).
What is a bit unique is: 1) we built it in Rust and 2) the website
is a little odd. Its design is inspired by CLIs (e.g., fzf, broot,
vim) instead of web apps, and as such, lacks some affordances that
you might typically expect in favor of keyboard-driven instant
navigations (we have the very ambitious goal of an FCP of 100ms).
In case you're curious, here's how we we built it:
https://gitdot.io/designs We recognize that we're making some bold
claims here and are also well aware that we have much to learn.
Building software is still hard, and that's a fact we seem to
relearn everyday. But we wanted to share what we built so far
nonetheless. Cheers, thank y'all for reading, and till the next
--paul & mikkel.
Author : baepaul
Score : 231 points
Date : 2026-06-08 16:52 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (gitdot.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (gitdot.io)
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| This is really interesting. Especially as its open source and I
| really liked the UI design of it.
|
| I was thinking about creating my own git forge given the
| unreliability of Github and I wouldn't be able to create just at
| the moment incredibly reliable software like git forge although I
| could use AI to create a minimalist piece of software, I didn't
| because I didn't want to create yet another AI slop fighting
| another AI slop (github/gitlab).
|
| Forejo is incredible but I have always wanted to get more
| alternatives in this field.
|
| Much thanks for making it. I have signed up and I have high hopes
| for it too and I will try to either self host this on my servers
| or gitdot.io as well as Github
|
| I recommend making a small community in matrix (preferred),
| fluxer.gg, discord etc. as I'd like to join it.
|
| PS: small personal thing that I have made which helps in making
| communities: https://mirror.forum
|
| I am definitely interested in gitdot.io! This seems incredible
|
| I wish nothing but the best for you folks. Gonna create a local
| copy of the source code of gitdot.io right now!
|
| Thanks for open-sourcing the efforts too. I really appreciate it
| :-D The software is so nice!
|
| I genuinely hope that you guys and the project blows up and if
| you guys might ever hire a junior dev, I hope you all could
| remember me as the world right now needed such software that you
| have made!! :-D (Although I am more interested in managing
| servers/golang but that's because rust is hard to learn as a
| beginner but that's different topic but I like rust's ideas too
| and rust is a great/preferred language with golang for this type
| of service :-D)
| wjsekfghks wrote:
| Thanks for the support, we really appreciate it. We want to
| create/support communities within the app in the future (via
| issues, etc) but ya it's a good idea to form some channels.
|
| It might be a bit difficult to self-host at the moment (as we
| don't have a good documentation to do so) but you can try and
| let us know how it goes.
| chwzr wrote:
| the design looks neat. + for hexagonal pattern on the backend -
| that fits perfectly!
| wjsekfghks wrote:
| thanks!
| mathisdev7 wrote:
| I hate that when we scroll through a codebase files, it changes
| the file we are hovering, I'd rather having to click to see the
| file
| wjsekfghks wrote:
| If you click the file row (not the filename as that will
| navigate to file page), then hovering over other files won't
| change the preview.
| tadfisher wrote:
| Yes, this particular UX is poor. It's not intuitive that
| clicking the filename has different behavior from clicking
| elsewhere in the file's row. Expanding the row inline needs a
| leading widget.
|
| This particular issue is solved in GitHub proper, and derives
| from the Windows 95 tree view widget [1], which I seem to
| remember from Windows 3.x but can't find a screenshot.
|
| The hover behavior is just not an intuitive or accessible
| default. I can't imagine someone being able to use this if they
| have a hard time clicking without moving the mouse. It also
| wastes resources fetching file/directory contents while the
| user is moving the cursor to a predetermined file they
| presumably wish to open.
|
| [1]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-
| us/windows/win32/winauto/syst...
| baepaul wrote:
| thank you both for the feedback, i'm revisiting it now and i
| do see what the both of you are illustrating.
|
| i think i will get rid of the change on hover, it is a
| distraction and perhaps was just my ambition to show people
| how fast we load.
|
| edit: fixed
| umanwizard wrote:
| Why does it have to be a website? Why merely "CLI-inspired" and
| not actually CLIs?
| garbagepatch wrote:
| Removes a barrier of entry if you can look at it from a browser
| instead of installing a CLI/TUI.
|
| Don't try to make me install a random program if I can view it
| in my sandboxed browser safely.
|
| Also, browsers have greasemonkey to help me personalize
| websites easily. TUIs don't.
| baepaul wrote:
| hrm. so i guess if the question is why not just make a software
| forge that is _only_ based in the CLI, the answer i think is
| convenience.
|
| it's very convenient to be sent a link (or find it on hacker
| news) and to be able to click around files, read the README,
| understand what a repository is about without having to clone
| it and open locally. plus -- if you only need a barebones git
| server with no web UI, git provides this by default.
|
| if the question is, will you build a CLI / what will be in it?
| the answer is yes, we do have a barebones CLI for auth as of
| now, do envision things like managing issues / PRs from the
| CLI, but want to make sure that strike the right balance there.
|
| i think TUIs can be deceptively hard to build well, and
| admittedly, it hasn't been a priority for us quite yet.
| eqvinox wrote:
| What's the differentiation against Forgejo going to be?
| baepaul wrote:
| forgejo is a pretty great piece of software.
|
| a lot of this we've really come to know as we dug into both it,
| gittea, gitlab, and all of their internals.
|
| i think the short answer as to a differentiator is design. our
| goal's to just build the best product possible, one that we'd
| love to use and one that we hope developers do too.
|
| some of the stuff we've been thinking about include: stacked
| diffs as PR primitive, a Nix-based CI (that's reproducible and
| locally testible), a super simple and intuitive bug tracker,
| and just making the site super duper fast and pleasant to use.
|
| that is to say, there is a _lot_ of surface area that a
| software forge covers and i think there's a lot of room to make
| things better.
|
| hope that's clear enough, apologies for any ambiguities, we do
| NOT have all the answers quite yet haha
| KolmogorovComp wrote:
| > i think there's a lot of room to make things better
|
| I think the question is why not try to make the other FOSS
| forges better instead of reinventing the wheel.
| eqvinox wrote:
| I'm a bit confused, aren't the Forgejo people trying to build
| the "best product possible", too? And there's more of them,
| and they have funding, and... between 2 good forges or 1
| great one, I rather have 1 great one... I guess you're not
| interested in joining them because it's not Rust?
| baepaul wrote:
| thank you both for asking.
|
| i think the honest answer here is autonomy. the freedom to
| choose our own tech stack, our own product priorities, and
| our own design.
|
| i'll also admit that i don't know forgejo's own priorities
| as well as i do our own, and that is negligence that we're
| due to correct. maybe they are perfectly aligned and it
| does make sense for us to join forces.
|
| but just as with any FOSS project, they have the freedom to
| choose what they work on as do we, and i intend on
| respecting that.
| esafak wrote:
| Is jj a first class citizen?
| screamingninja wrote:
| > 5. What features will gitdot not have?
|
| > AI.
|
| > We view AI as an implementation detail -- and do not think that
| using it is necessarily good.
|
| > In fact, we think it makes many products worse by acting as a
| bandaid for poor design.
|
| > That isn't to say we are blind to it, but that we will be
| judicious in our use of it instead.
|
| Not sure I follow. What feature are the developers referring to?
| I understand that AI will power tools that may or may not fit a
| particular use case. How is AI a feature and what does it mean to
| be anti-AI?
| ronsor wrote:
| That's not really anti-AI. Anti-AI would mean avoiding it as a
| value regardless of practicality.
|
| That sounds more like anti-enshittification.
| trollbridge wrote:
| AI is rapidly becoming a synonym for enshittification. It can
| be a little aggravating. I am trying to judiciously use terms
| like "agent" or "LLM" so I can avoid just lazily saying "AI",
| which is often a pejorative term now.
| baepaul wrote:
| yeah thanks for digging in, this was a bit ambiguous.
|
| so take this to mean - 1) no AI copilot in the app and 2) no
| training on your data nor selling of it.
|
| our take on AI is that we should focus on building tools that
| help address its limitations; one of the things we're
| particularly keen on is building stacked diffs into reviews as
| a primitive, so it's easier to review a large AI-generated (or
| assisted) PR. (e.g., diff 1 for API changes, diff 2 for backend
| wireup, diff 3 for front-end changes)
|
| i think to do that, we're going to try and hook into the
| subscriptions that people already have and are paying for:
| Claude, Codex, rather than package our own, but some of that is
| a bit hacky to do.
|
| hope that's clearer and thank you for asking
| 7moritz7 wrote:
| I'm honestly lost for words over how you can write something
| like this while the web app's source code is clearly heavily
| integrated with Claude Code.
|
| https://gitdot.io/bkdevs/gitdot/files
| alexpadula wrote:
| I don't get that. https://gitdot.io/bkdevs/gitdot/gitdot-
| api/CLAUDE.md they use agent files in every repo directory for
| the gitdot code.
| Kiro wrote:
| I think you're in an interesting space where there's a real
| opportunity to create something fresh. When people are actively
| looking for alternatives it will be easier to break out of the
| established norms.
|
| What does anti-AI mean? Don't really see anything about it in the
| design doc except "no AI copilot".
| baepaul wrote:
| thank you kiro! (i feel you may be slightly miffed about the
| AWS IDE taking your name haha)
|
| i replied in a separate comment:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48452052 but to reiterate:
| 1) no AI copilot and 2) no training or selling of your data.
|
| but overall, the general ethos is to focus on the problems that
| AI is introducing as of now and how we can help solve them,
| rather than just build AI features with abandon assuming that
| they're good.
|
| some stuff that we do know about: the influx of slop PRs / slop
| issues on popular repositories, losing agency our own of code
| as we AI generates more, and privacy/sovereignty of code.
|
| i've talked a bit about stacked diffs which we do see as one
| concrete stab in that direction, but a lot here is to be
| admittedly sketched out.
| TazeTSchnitzel wrote:
| The minimal look feels very refreshing, and yet it's not
| disorienting like many minimal web git UIs are in my experience;
| I actually feel like I know how to navigate this thing. Site
| feels very snappy too, especially with those instantly loading
| file previews when you hover. Congrats!
| baepaul wrote:
| thank you! of all things in this launch, i was the most anxious
| about the design as it is admittedly the most different.
|
| glad to hear the positive feedback :)
| worldsayshi wrote:
| It seems like the site is currently getting hugged so I can't
| look but I'm glad someone is trying to achieve a more
| minimalistic take on the UX of a software forge. It seems
| like an area with good room for improvement.
| baepaul wrote:
| the hn hug is real indeed, hopefully this link is fine. a
| bit wordy, but goes into quite a lot of the thinking that
| went into the design: https://gitdot.io/designs/gitdot-
| designed-by-developers
| SwiftyBug wrote:
| I absolutely love the minimalist UI.
|
| I see code reviews is in the roadmap, I can't wait to try it.
| chaoxu wrote:
| Feels like one can just copy the UI and use it for forgejo. It
| would get something similar very quickly, and avoid handling
| all the difficult stuff I guess.
| garbagepatch wrote:
| I like the terminal aesthetics but please, for accessibility's
| sake, make input boxes look more like input boxes and buttons
| look like buttons.
| baepaul wrote:
| thank you for the feedback, yeah i've been going and trimming a
| few places where i think my own tendencies have gone a bit too
| far.
|
| i will also say on accessibility, i recognize the site is a bit
| too small font in general -- and will fix it soon.
| mentos wrote:
| Generally probably shouldn't try to innovate in too many
| places at once
| baepaul wrote:
| we are well aware and duly noted. thank you for the
| feedback
| nine_k wrote:
| I would humbly suggest that a reasonable site should assume
| that the user has set the comfortable font size in the
| browser, and make all other font sizes in percentages, or
| using rem units.
| Cieric wrote:
| Seems interesting an I'll take more of a peek after work, but one
| thing that stood out to me is the only way back to the home page
| after navigating to a repo is the back button. Going back to the
| home page via the back button also doesn't retain that "new" was
| selected. But I agree with others, I do like the simplicity of
| the site.
| wjsekfghks wrote:
| you can press "h" to go back to homepage :)
| baepaul wrote:
| this hn thread is interesting as it feels like i'm getting to
| revisit a lot of decisions i've made in the design haha.
|
| i debated this for a while too, some of my thinking for how it
| is is that i wanted the focus of a repository page to be _the
| repository_. so as much as we can, trim things that might
| detract.
|
| it was also done with the intention that it's actually pretty
| rare for a user to find or explore repositories on github (more
| likely you find them here on hn or on twitter), so had the
| restraint of really trying _not_ to make gitdot anything like
| social media.
|
| but thank you nonetheless for the feedback, i'll revisit it
| proper and see if i can make this more intuitive.
| Cieric wrote:
| I think I can understand that reasoning. I do have a tendency
| to explore, especially at the start since it gives me a view
| of what the site can already do, cause I wouldn't want to run
| into issues with my own projects without knowing of the
| possible limitations ahead of time.
|
| If anything since the keyboard shortcut already exists, you
| could always put it in little cursor menu at the bottom of
| the screen. But yeah up to you, I look forward to your
| progress.
| mbreese wrote:
| I'm not sure I agree with all of your takes either. For
| example, I'm not anti-AI for coding, so that immediately made
| me click away. I'm glad I read the comments though because I
| think the take of "not using your code to train AI" makes a
| lot more sense.
|
| But, I wanted to say thanks for posting this and being really
| open in the comments. It's hard to get so much feedback so
| quickly. It's a firehouse of criticism that's hard to deal
| with.
|
| You're handling it well.
| baepaul wrote:
| thank you mbreese, i know folks can be mean and i also
| recognize where they're coming from (we are certainly far
| from perfect), but this comment is nice to read.
|
| thank you for the empathy.
| jacques_chester wrote:
| It is ... problematic ... to lead with "anti-AI" and then bury
| terms like "judicious in our use of it" in the fine print.
|
| IMO a team like yours can either:
|
| * Use LLMs, in which case you aren't "anti-AI".
|
| * Not use LLMs currently, but the non-use is not due to following
| a principle, in which case you aren't "anti-AI".
|
| * Not use LLMs and promise never to do so.
|
| I'm happy you are trying something new. But you hurt yourself by
| engaging in something very old: disingenuity.
|
| (edits for presentation and grammar)
| baepaul wrote:
| yeah this has been pointed out a few times, will revise the
| copytext later but will keep it up for the duration of the
| post.
|
| hope our sentiment is clearer in the comments that i've made, i
| think i've made the mistake of phrasing here with the "anti",
| i'll revisit it.
|
| edit: dang has removed it, apologies for the confusion i
| caused, that was my mistake.
| dang wrote:
| I've taken that bit out of the title for the time being, since
| it was causing confusion.
| skrtskrt wrote:
| Love the idea of someone tackling this space in Rust, but please
| just make a normal UI, I have no idea what I am looking at.
| 382hi wrote:
| I personally prefer the GitDot UI over the bloated corporate
| style UIs that all feel the same
| gerardojbaez wrote:
| Agree!
| abathologist wrote:
| Would be interested in a comparison with https://sourcehut.org/
| (which has a comparable minimal aesthetic, but also has the deep
| benefit of being FOSS.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| Gitdot is FOSS as well from my understanding.
| 7moritz7 wrote:
| There is a dozen CLAUDE.md in the gitdot source. The "Anti-AI" in
| your title seems a bit disingenuous.
| isatty wrote:
| Maybe it's the HN effect but /files takes a while to load.
|
| Personally while I appreciate something not being AI slop,
| writing something in Rust has no meaning to me.
| baepaul wrote:
| yeah this is because we're currently (very temporarily) hosting
| things in NFS and git stat operations are very slow since they
| assume a fast file FS. we'll fix that in a few.
|
| and yeahhhh, i do try to be very non-marketing in all that i
| say, but something about the title made me a bit ambitious,
| apologies.
| ramon156 wrote:
| A lot of fuss that needs to be chiseled out first. There's an
| idiom that is followed a bit too black and white, but the grey is
| grey.
|
| No loading animation, but my screen jitters while loading in
| stuff. My internet speed is fine, so it's a performance/bug
| issue.
|
| I also did not initially understand the UI, but that'll come as I
| use it more
| baepaul wrote:
| yeah the site isn't perfect.
|
| my fixation here is to make everything load instant, but that
| is dependent on server latencies, which right now is admittedly
| slow as we only have one server in the US.
|
| but thank you for giving it a shot nonetheless!
| graypegg wrote:
| Interesting stuff! I really like the design philosophy you're
| applying here, where the browser/web behaviour is actually part
| of the UX. Pretty rare for web application nowadays!
|
| If I could make one suggestion, I really like the old MacOS
| "inspector" pattern. Basically a consistent way to get meta-
| information about any "thing" the user chooses to inspect. Your
| right sidebar is going towards that, but it would need some work
| to make it more consistent between views.
|
| GitHub's UI has these weird meta-states/restrictions that are so
| badly explained in the UI they feel like bugs. Each line gets a
| [...] menu in github which lets you see the blame/spawn a issue
| linking to it/get a permalink/etc. It's a totally different UI in
| the diff view, and then totally different again if you're looking
| at a comment referencing a line in a diff AND different if it's
| referencing a permalink to a line in a file, even if it's the
| same code that would be in that diff!
|
| I want the UI to have obvious "nouns". If the UI is showing me a
| line of code, even if it's in a diff view, let me "inspect" it
| and get the exact same meta-info + tools I get for lines of code
| anywhere. It's "a line", not a weird meta state of "a line, but
| you're in the comment of a PR linking to this line".
|
| Same concept applies to comments/commits/authors/etc. If the UI
| shows me a username, I should be able to pull up a "who is that
| again" inspector. Going into github's commit view, clicking on a
| name... and being sent to a filtered list of that person's
| commits makes zero sense to me because this is the ONLY place
| where that happens. That behaviour should be a "recent commits"
| button inside some "user inspector".
| baepaul wrote:
| thank you!
|
| i'm not aware of the old macOS inspector pattern, but this
| sounds super interesting and i agree with the critique of
| inconsistency in github's behavior.
|
| this reminds me a tad of superhuman's right panel too which
| auto-populates upon writing a time (or typing a name i
| believe?), which is a feature i do find personally useful as
| well.
|
| i haven't thought seriously about hovers on nouns quite yet,
| but this is giving me much to munch on.
|
| thank you sincerely this is dope.
| flexagoon wrote:
| Feels weird to ship a website without mobile support in this day.
| The desktop version looks nice though
| alienbaby wrote:
| Didn't work for me even when I chose to see the desktop site in
| my mobile browser :/
| baepaul wrote:
| it is based off a minimum pixel as of now, apologies.
|
| the overall reason why we didn't ship a mobile site is that
| code is inherently very hard to read on mobile
|
| and i think to do that properly, you have to design
| explicitly for it. (and that is not, in fact, something that
| i do want to vibe code)
| nine_k wrote:
| At least it would be reasonable to show a message like
| "Sorry, no mobile support yet".
| quuxplusone wrote:
| As a banner or something, maybe. But I'd much rather see
| a broken-looking site on mobile than see nothing at all
| on mobile.
|
| In the same category: websites that display nothing but a
| splash screen "This site requires Internet Explorer X" or
| whatever. Don't nanny me, just feed my browser the HTML!
| Whether my browser can render it properly is my problem,
| not yours.
| denysvitali wrote:
| > Mobile support to come.
|
| In 2026 not being mobile first is a bit of a disappointment to be
| honest
| applfanboysbgon wrote:
| This is a violation of Git's trademark, and your usage of it is
| expressly prohibited by their policy.
|
| https://git-scm.com/about/trademark
|
| > [...] you may not use any of the Marks as a syllable in a new
| word or as part of a portmanteau (e.g., "Gitalicious",
| "Gitpedia") used as a mark for a third-party product or service.
|
| > Please be aware that GitHub and GitLab are exceptions to this
| Policy because they are subject to explicit licensing
| arrangements that pre-date, and thus take precedence, over this
| Policy.
|
| You might've known that if you hadn't vibe-launched this while
| for some reason marketing it as anti-AI, but here we are in a
| world where basic research is a dead art.
| clickety_clack wrote:
| I'd love to hear an IP lawyer weigh in on this, because I've
| never heard of this kind of thing before. It doesn't seem
| correct that you can use trademark alone like this to extend
| beyond the actual word used in the trademark. Maybe it's from
| licensing or something, ie maybe if a product uses the actual
| git product, then the git license means you can't use the name
| as part of a word.
| applfanboysbgon wrote:
| Trademark law is ridiculously slanted in favour of existing
| rightsholders. The most famous example I know of is "McSleep
| Inn", which was sued by McDonalds and forced to change their
| name. I think that ruling was complete bullshit, because Mc
| is so generic and usually a prime factor of trademark law is
| whether the businesses operate in similar domains, but it
| goes to show how broad the protections can be. Something like
| "GitFoo", which is explicitly being used specifically on a
| site for hosting Git repositories, doesn't stand a chance in
| hell, and rightfully so because this is _actually_ trying to
| take advantage of Git 's name to market their product.
| clickety_clack wrote:
| They might have been sued, but did they change the name
| just to settle out of court? McDonald's failed to maintain
| the trademark on "Big Mac" in Europe when it actually went
| to a court room https://www.theguardian.com/business/articl
| e/2024/jun/05/big...
| applfanboysbgon wrote:
| They did not settle, hence my usage of the wording
| "ruling" and "forced to change".
|
| > For the reasons given the Court finds and concludes
| that (1) McDonald's is entitled to enforce its family of
| marks that are characterized by the combination of the
| prefix "Mc" with a generic word; (2) the name McSleep Inn
| is likely to cause an appreciable number of the public to
| be confused by believing that McSleep Inn is sponsored,
| associated, affiliated, connected, or endorsed by
| McDonald's; and (3) the adoption and use by Quality
| International of the name McSleep Inn was a deliberate
| attempt to benefit by the good will and reputation of
| McDonald's. Therefore, the Court will find trademark
| infringement, unfair competition, and dilution under the
| Illinois statute (Ill.Rev.Stat. Ch. 140, SS 22).
|
| https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-
| courts/FSupp/6...
|
| I suppose it's not surprising that Europe is less
| favorable to frivolous trademark claims made by American
| corporations than America is.
| baepaul wrote:
| thank you both for chiming in.
|
| i will be honest and say that we didn't do our due diligence
| here (we simply assumed that it would be okay to do so, given
| the existence of GitHub, GitLab, GitKraken, GitButler, and so
| forth).
|
| it does look like from digging in: https://public-
| inbox.org/git/20170202022655.2jwvudhvo4hmueaw...
|
| that portmanteaus are prohibited by the policy that the Git
| PLC enforces, which as Jeff notes in his email above, does
| grant incumbent advantages to grandfathered names (e.g.,
| GitHub, GitLab).
|
| we'll reach out to the conservancy, ask for explicit
| permission, and if not, rebrand.
| zZorgz wrote:
| In my opinion (which may be worth little), by using "git"
| in your product's name today you are also locking onto that
| technology. So if an another or better VCS comes along
| (like jj) that you want to embrace it could be harder.
| (Kind of like how Bitbucket betted wrongly on hg, then
| later added and switched to git).
| pdimitar wrote:
| I mean OK, valid, and they really should get on it.
|
| But you are squinting really hard if you equate "programmers
| not being good lawyers" with "they obviously vibe-launched the
| product".
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| If you look at any other details of this it is very clearly
| vibecoded.
| rfgplk wrote:
| Git is open source/public domain. Trademarks don't apply to it.
| applfanboysbgon wrote:
| > Git is open source/public domain. Trademarks don't apply to
| it.
|
| Public domain and open source are two completely unrelated
| concepts. If open source were public domain, you could not
| license usage of it (MIT, GPL, etc.). What is the point of
| confidently asserting something you're completely ignorant
| about as though it were factual?
| latexr wrote:
| That's not right. You can very much apply trademarks to open-
| source software. See for example Mozilla Firefox. Also, open-
| source and public domain are not the same thing. Finally, git
| is GPL.
| moojacob wrote:
| I love the design. Clean and refreshing - you start at the left
| and every sub element goes to the right. Like a file browser. And
| the commit screen is dense but super readable. I would move the
| summary column from the right of the README to the left of the
| README on the /home screen (and call /home the /README).
|
| Loading files is very slow but I assume that's because HN is
| hammering the server.
|
| I am not a believer in negative advertising. So I don't give a
| poop you are anti-ai. Or "better" than Github (better for who??).
| Just imply you are a code forge thats made for serious developers
| who need something engineered to be fast and reliable.
|
| I wish you the best of luck, I can see Linear coming out with git
| repos after coming out with a diff reader. I have a suspicion
| there's space for many code forges in the market as you build out
| more features, especially if you lean into your products hacker-
| y-ness
| daishi55 wrote:
| > anti-AI
|
| > mobile support to come
|
| Cmon lol. Give opus 20min and it will give you a mobile site
| throw in a better-looking desktop site for fun.
| purple-leafy wrote:
| I mean, no offence but nothing is more of a signal of marketing
| fluff to me than saying "built in Rust" or "anti-AI"
|
| Tell us why we should care outside of the marketing fluff - these
| aren't highlights - if anything they are quite off putting.
|
| Your project needs to stand on its own actual merits.
|
| Critique over, congratulations on launching something or building
| something anyway.
|
| But what makes this different? And why have you chosen that
| philosophy - outside of marketing fluff
| Sailemi wrote:
| Big fan of the design! Different but easy to get a hand of.
| Having /profile also be linked on the homepage with the other
| main pages for ease of navigation would be nice, the profile link
| at the bottom feels like it clashes with the rest of the UI to my
| eyes.
| hntiz wrote:
| Just one minor piece of feedback that's unlikely to be a
| priority. I cannot fully navigate when browsing in a terminal
| browser (chawan in my case, haven't tried with w3m or lynx). For
| example the "h" keymap for going home does not work.
|
| That said though, one of my pet peeves around browsing Github Web
| from the terminal was having to click "skip to content" just to
| get the body. So you definitely delivered there (after having
| read your design post). Good luck with the rest of the year.
| baepaul wrote:
| oh wow i have not thought about terminal browsers in a while (i
| used to use one back in the day in college haha).
|
| yeah, that admittedly is not priority, but thanks for taking
| the time to check it out.
| HyperL0gi wrote:
| > What is a bit unique is: 1) we built it in Rust
|
| The first unique characteristic is that it was built in Rust? Why
| does it matter from a user perspective? I was expecting the first
| point to be something that would convince me to check it out.
|
| Unless the goal is to find people to collaborate on building the
| software. I got a bit confused.
|
| Looking good regardless :)
| ecares wrote:
| I am tired of "built in Rust" as an argument, you are spot on,
| it should not matter. But you are shooting right at Rust
| culture here haha
| saghm wrote:
| And I'm tired of the "tired of 'built in Rust'" arguments
| because it also shouldn't matter if someone happens to
| describe their project that you didn't have to go out of your
| way to talk about in a way that bothers you. But I'm shooting
| right at the "tired of 'built in Rust'" culture here.
|
| You can take these arguments to an unbounded level of depth;
| someone can be tired of my responses to the responses to so
| me someone happening to care about something different than
| them. It's all equally silly, and if you're convinced that
| your level of depth is reasonable but the others aren't, I'd
| highly recommend trying to think about why you're so
| confident that your opinion is important but ones that come
| after aren't, because it's very unclear to anyone who doesn't
| already agree with you, and that's usually a sign that
| there's no point in saying it at all.
| pitched wrote:
| I worry that what they're trying to say is that it was vibe
| coded but vibe coded in a language with a pretty solid linter.
|
| What an irony that those exact safety guarantees that made it
| attractive are now a detriment because they make the project
| smell like AI.
| baepaul wrote:
| fair critique. i'll refrain from it in the future.
|
| but i will say that the point of our post isn't to really sell
| anyone here or on anything. we kinda know that our product as-
| is isn't ready to use at real scale (we lack issues, prs, ci,
| gotta fix a lot of bugs, etc.)
|
| we did just want to sincerely share what we built. and rust is
| a part of that, we chose it cause we wanted to learn it and we
| then quickly found out that we really liked it too.
| layer8 wrote:
| While we're critiquing, the demographics that I'm part of has
| trouble taking someone seriously who is too lazy or sloppy to
| use the Shift key and complete punctutation.
| dstanko wrote:
| totally agree we should not tollerate lack of shift key use
| and punctuation
| globalnode wrote:
| guess im a joke to you then
| kbelder wrote:
| I hate that too, of course, but as long as it doesn't creep
| into the actual product or website itself, it doesn't
| really matter.
|
| At least they aren't using five digit years...
| kbelder wrote:
| And after looking at the site more, I have to say I'm
| pretty interested. It is a nice-feeling site. There's a
| few UI oddities that need to have the rough edges sanded
| off, but I very much like the main approach.
| socalgal2 wrote:
| what demographic is that?
|
| Me, on an international team, as learned that flawless
| english sentences as a metric about as silly as dress codes
| in business. I'll take my california laidback-ness to your
| stuffy NYC banker rules.
| saghm wrote:
| The demographics I'm part of have trouble taking seriously
| people who yell at kids who live two blocks away when
| someone from one block away wanders onto the yard the kids
| are playing in.
| gpm wrote:
| > Unless the goal is to find people to collaborate on building
| the software.
|
| Surely it is at least in part. We're talking about the
| announcement of a new open source project that isn't ready to
| use yet which would presumably enjoy people helping make it
| work for them, and a new startup around that open source
| project that is likely to be hiring in the future (or even
| maybe right now? Didn't check).
|
| > Why does it matter from a user perspective
|
| It implies that there was likely a small degree of rigour in
| the construction... not a large one (very little software has
| that)... and not a guarantee... but likely more than the
| abysmally small average in the software world.
| domtron_vox wrote:
| I signed up and the code email went to spam. A quick look at the
| DNS seemed to show you were lacking DKIM and DMARC records.
|
| If I'm not mistaken about that, you should remedy that to ensure
| email providers don't dump your emails to spam.
| wjsekfghks wrote:
| Thanks for flagging, we were missing DMARC, now added
| Grimblewald wrote:
| Bit odd it was missing at all. Makes me wonder how well the
| core infrastructure you're building on is understood, and how
| trustworthy any of this really is. If all I'm getting is some
| vibeslop, with zero expertise or skill added, even basic
| stuff like this, why shouldnt I just vibe my own better
| version tailored to my needs exactly? Same headaches as with
| your app (though likely less give what's on display), only
| now I dont pay you to give me headaches and I retain control.
|
| The software was never the moat. The skills and experience
| crystalised within it was, and remains, the product.
| usrbinenv wrote:
| No mobile version, but I'm visiting from a tablet, should work at
| least if switch to "Desktop" in the browser manually. I don't
| care if I get horizontal scroll - not showing your visitors
| anything at all is an automatic "I'm out".
|
| Second, when I browsed from an actual desktop, and clicked on
| links for files it was all slow as hell - specifically the part
| when you click on a file an expect it to just load, you instead
| get: 1) some layout switch which looks like page reload 2) then
| it says "loading..." for several seconds.
|
| After looking at the source code, it appears to be React or
| similar frontend framework... Ugh. I don't know why people choose
| to use that stuff, just have a regular SSR which would work a
| hundred times faster and is more pleasant. And if you really want
| an SPA, don't use React, Vue or Svelte (and similar), it's
| horrible and always slow.
|
| Finally, since this appears to be a YC company, it shouldn't
| matter what's it written in. In fact, I don't even know why Rust
| would be a good thing here when Go or even Rails/Django would
| work just fine - but again, it just reinforces the meme that if
| it's written in Rust, you'll surely hear about it.
|
| Overall, the minimalism idea is welcomed, but it supposedly
| should appeal to people like myself and it doesn't for all the
| reasons I mentioned above.
| xp84 wrote:
| I have to agree with the proposition that if you are aiming for
| the performant, no frills deal - and the aesthetic certainly
| telegraphs this - you really do not need client-side render,
| nor overengineered frontend frameworks like React & friends.
| Ditto for Styled Components (looks like you're not using the
| latter).
| johnisgood wrote:
| I agree. I like the website, looks minimal, but minimalism is
| not reflected in the stack.
| kode-targz wrote:
| absolutely this, and I feel the same way about finding it
| unappealing due to the inconsistency between their "talk" and
| their "walk". If you preach minimalism but use React or
| anything similar, you've lost the plot and don't understand
| what minimalism is at all.
| selectnull wrote:
| > Install gitdot-cli to push and clone private repos
|
| Hmmm... no. Why should I? Just let me use git.
| Simon-curtis wrote:
| This project looks awesome. I've really enjoyed your blogs about
| the design process and learnings. Brave to jump into Rust while
| learning a new domain but very commendable. Wish I had a close
| programmer friend to do this stuff with, sounds like a great
| asset to have such great chemistry.
|
| You seem to be experienced devs, so I'm sure you already know,
| but don't listen to the contrarians on HN. They'll suck the life
| out of you because it's not 100% the way they like it.
| triyambakam wrote:
| Sorry but the name is too hard to say. At least it's not as bad
| as Forgejo
| NetOpWibby wrote:
| Did you guys just make my own git forge plans useless? This looks
| great!
|
| I was gonna call mine EOL and I already bought the domain
| eol.sh...then again, I could just do mine in TypeScript and
| launch it anyway.
| sigmonsays wrote:
| that UI is way too opinionated
| gerdesj wrote:
| Big Brother seems to be built in to us humans.
|
| git itself is decentralised - all repos are equal. Mr T designed
| it that way because ... well that's all that was needed for Linux
| kernel development back in the day and it still seems to work.
| The management stuff can be managed quite well via email and some
| choice socials. Obviously that nonsense cannot possibly scale to
| the size of your enterprise thingies!
|
| Yet again we have a better Big Brother than Big Brother ... this
| time with Rust, yum!
| applfanboysbgon wrote:
| [flagged]
| reactordev wrote:
| what makes you think they are abandoned? Maybe they are in-
| use...? Maybe the landscape shifted to where niche tools like
| that aren't monetizable?
| applfanboysbgon wrote:
| The landing page is still a "join the waitlist" placeholder
| and there hasn't been a single commit since one week after
| they announced it, ten months ago. Together with the entire
| repo and the ShowHN post itself being vibed through and
| through, it seems apparent that putting any amount of human
| effort into that project was never on the agenda. Which
| naturally leads one to wonder, what makes this project
| different?
| reactordev wrote:
| it's YC we are talking about, everything is vibed through.
| Grimblewald wrote:
| 1. It's unfinished 2. Textbook slop dump and run
|
| we can see one big initial push, not too suspect. Then a few
| superficial updates, and then nothing for months.
|
| Unfinished, broken, and ostentiably abandond due to being an
| unmaintaible nightmare as vibeslop tends to be.
| spiralcoaster wrote:
| We shouldn't trust the new project. Right from [1] you linked
| to:
|
| > The problems I kept running into:
|
| > - I'm lazy.
|
| That should tell you all you need to know about this super hype
| new fantastic GitHub written in Rust ! ! ! !
| johnfn wrote:
| This is unfair, and the vibe-coded swipe is unnecessary. Why
| would anyone continue working on a project if it's not seeing
| any adoption or interest? Many large successful apps were borne
| out of sharp pivots - Slack comes to mind.
| applfanboysbgon wrote:
| I would perhaps be less inclined to make a point out of the
| vibe coding if they had not literally put "anti-AI" in the
| title as a key point of their marketing (although Dang
| removed it). I think it's absolutely fair to point out the
| hypocrisy and disingenuity of marketing a vibe-coded product
| in that way.
| johnfn wrote:
| It is entirely reasonable that you could use AI to build a
| product with no AI features. Why is that hypocritical?
| Especially for a product like a GitHub -- it's a reasonable
| take to say "AI is useful tool to produce code, but I don't
| want 851 random "Ask AI!" adornments all over my website
| when I just want to read the code."
| OsrsNeedsf2P wrote:
| What's wrong with pivoting until you PMF?
| sbarre wrote:
| Maybe ask the people who buy in early but are left behind by
| the pivot
| syngrog66 wrote:
| unfortunate name: very similar to Godot at passing glance. my
| brain already stumbles going back and forth between seeing LLVM
| and LLM, IP (Internet protocol) and IP (Intellectual property).
| Don't me started on X vs X vs X vs ...
|
| I do like that it reinforces this rule of thumb:
| Q: "How do you know if any given piece of software is written in
| Rust? A: "Oh they'll tell you. They *will* tell you.
| Upfront and over and over again."
| edfletcher_t137 wrote:
| > 7. How does gitdot make money?
|
| > We don't.
|
| This _cannot_ last forever. What 's the plan when it runs out?
| mckee_plus_plus wrote:
| Paul & Mikkel work at GitHub and are trying to offload traffic
| from gh
| keyle wrote:
| We've built a better SpaceX! says kid with cardboard rocket in
| the backyard. In Rust we trust!
|
| Common man, you're not even 5% of a Github replacement. Don't act
| like one. You've built a Git web UI with accounts, the easy part.
|
| > Building software is still hard
|
| You don't say.
| dang wrote:
| " _Please don 't post shallow dismissals, especially of other
| people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something._"
|
| " _Don 't be snarky._"
|
| " _Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of
| what someone says, not a weaker one that 's easier to
| criticize. Assume good faith._"
|
| Obviously this is a project at an early stage and the title
| expresses what they're working on, not a claim to 100% feature
| parity.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| alexpadula wrote:
| It's pretty honest, some times you have to be.
| dang wrote:
| There are many ways to be honest, and some of them are
| within the site guidelines. Commenters should be honest in
| those ways.
| keyle wrote:
| Thanks for reminding me, I appreciate it.
|
| However there is justice for commenting poorly, there
| doesn't seem to be justice for posting lies and deceit,
| which is borderline a serial case here(?).
| carterschonwald wrote:
| i want to view desktop on my mobile... and it wont lettt meeeee
| skeledrew wrote:
| I see "anti-AI" in the description and I wonder what that
| entails. Then I try to look at one of those tending links and all
| I encounter is "Mobile support to come.", and mobile is my
| primary device for checking things out. I want to stay positive
| about the future if this project, but Idk what to think here.
| Grimblewald wrote:
| FAQ point 5 is pure comedy.
| 999900000999 wrote:
| >As of now, all repositories are free, but we do envision
| charging for private repositories for teams in the future.
|
| Please don't do this.
|
| Charge a fair price, in fact find a fair price and double it.
|
| I don't want a free GitHub clone, I want one that works.
|
| How about 50$
|
| 50 private repos, 50GBs of git LFS storage. Add collaborators for
| free.
|
| Actually respond to customers. At this level you only need 1000
| paying customers to make it worth while for 2 developers.
| adrianwaj wrote:
| Would you pledge in a crowd-funding campaign to build something
| like this?
|
| You'd want something that doesn't allow training on private
| repos, so ideally not a private company that can change owners
| and managers and hence policies over time.
|
| It's an interesting business case - open source website,
| revenue generating with some type of "open" business structure.
|
| Its first repos could be of itself.
|
| I had this idea for enabling pull requests to be in "pipelines"
| with each request crowd-funded (as an option) to thereby entice
| action. A small split could return to the main site itself for
| upkeep.
| 999900000999 wrote:
| Or full blown encrypted repos where only you have the key.
|
| Or, if we go a step further you pay a licensing fee for
| Gitdot and self host it.
|
| The cookie jar of AI training data is very hard to resist
| even if it's a non profit
|
| I think 50$ is the minimum you could charge and still have
| responsive customer support.
| erlau wrote:
| Oxenai is private but their vcs is open source including
| the server, so you could self host it for free and use it
| with other people. The vcs itself is a little bit like git
| but with native large fial support
|
| I could be wrong but I think besides being able to self
| host for free you can also pay for something where they
| help you set it up and stuff
|
| Something nifty also that you can do is that instead of
| them training on your data they enable you to train your
| own models on it and download the weights.
|
| Definitely agreed its hard to trust anything you cant audit
| 100%. I think a non profit structured the right way would
| probably be pretty trustworthy not to do anything egregious
| like training on your data though. Or some way maybe to
| make the thing transparent so you know what happens with
| the data and you can basically audit the company somehow. I
| dont know if you would need to go as far as encrypted
| repos, that seems a little too paranoid but that would be a
| really interesting idea for a company although the target
| audience is probably limited
| j3s wrote:
| "we built it in rust" is not a differentiator - especially when
| the first thing that happens when i click a repo is "mobile not
| supported"
|
| lol. really stretching the word "better"
| OSaMaBiNLoGiN wrote:
| Most people would agree that Github isn't good software anymore.
|
| Most people would also agree that building a _better_ Github is
| not a super easy two-person task.
| Aeolun wrote:
| Ooh, it's the same thing I'm building.
| icase wrote:
| is anyone else absolutely sick of hearing about rust?
| wseqyrku wrote:
| Yeah, what I did was reading about it instead, like, on
| purpose.
| Uptrenda wrote:
| So like: not to hijack thread -- but is there any way to post
| about what you've built on HN without making people angry if its
| vibe coded? What's the etiquette there because I have a thingy I
| am going to post soon (open source, non commerical) and don't
| really want to be ripped apart by HN. I am a software engineer
| but doubt that matters if it's all vibe coded.
| smetannik wrote:
| Please, stop using "written in Rust" as some kind of advantage or
| killer feature.
| yashasolutions wrote:
| This.
| chrishare wrote:
| Well, it probably is an advantage over the same product written
| in say C++, all other variables held the same - just not a big
| one.
| analog_daddy wrote:
| No, it is an advantage.
|
| I am not a rust evangelist, I am not a rust programmer or
| programmer at all; however while evaluating tools to use,
| anything written in Rust and Go at-least gets me to look at the
| project in more detail, since they most likely are able to ship
| statically linked binaries, which has been one of the key
| criteria for my personal evaluation of tools to select and use.
|
| So, you might not consider it as a valid signal, however it
| might be for other users. Even if it has a negative connotation
| for you. Which in itself, again might be a good filter in case
| you don't want to use it.
| altmanaltman wrote:
| How is statically linked binaries an unique advantage of rust
| or go? you can do the same with C, C++, pascal, ada, zig, and
| more. Rust even doesnt do the static binary file by default.
|
| You might have better devops experience as an end-user of the
| said software if its statically linked and its a good trend
| in software sure but it is not unique to go or rust.
|
| Admitting you don't know how to code and still trying to
| argue rust is better is just wild sorry.
| zamalek wrote:
| Zig and probably Pascal have the same advantage, can't
| speak for Ada as I've never built it.
|
| C and C++? You've got to be joking. If the project provides
| static binaries, sure, but I don't want to have to worry
| about finding a necronomicon and summoning the correct kind
| of imp required to properly use whatever insane build
| system the project is using.
| altmanaltman wrote:
| You are missing the point here. Single binary files are
| not what makes a programming language good or bad.
|
| Its like saying "I want a red car because it goes fast"
| when people are actually disucssing how the engine works
| or how easy/difficult is it to drive etc.
|
| You cannot base your like/dislike on that single criteria
| and expect that to actually make sense.
| dijit wrote:
| This totally depends.
|
| For _some_ people, Linux package management is not
| solved. Static binaries at least _work_ for deployment.
|
| More useful for client software, but you can't just
| dismiss someone for having this preference given the poor
| viability of running arbitrary binaries on Linux due to
| GNU's userland style.
| johnisgood wrote:
| No, it does not depend. Your parent is correct with his
| analogy.
|
| Linux package management is solved, if it depends on
| something, it depends on the specific Linux distribution,
| but "Linux" package management is definitely solved.
| johnisgood wrote:
| Off: I thought I am becoming dumb, but this really puts
| me in a new perspective. The odd thing is that even
| people who work in IT hold similar beliefs. I am not
| entirely sure what is going on. Favoring a language so
| blindly seems like a thing, apparently? For example they
| seem to have convinced themselves that Rust is "safe" if
| you use it for anything (without implementing the
| security features) because it is (memory) safe? I did not
| imagine beginners would make such a mistake either, but
| alas.
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| And thus, we all agree that Linux, Windows, and OS X are
| all bad software, because they're written in C and C++
| and have insanely complicated build systems.
| nananana9 wrote:
| There's a pretty strong culture of "no static linking
| because I need to replace the .so to preserve my freedom
| hurr durr" in a lot of Linux spaces, so quite a few of
| these C/C++ FOSS libraries are a pain in the ass to
| statically link.
|
| Literally last week I was porting something to Linux and
| had to rewrite the libwayland build scripts because they
| only expose a shared object.
|
| There's also an expectation that you're going to install
| them via your system's package manager, not build them, so
| a lot of them use insane build systems (autotools, meson).
| pastage wrote:
| You are right that there are many of us who prefer the
| package manager, there are so many reasons why a package
| manager makes your life wonderful. Debian has always been
| a proponent of dynamic linking. When you create a Linux
| distribution that is a big plus.
|
| For me install size matters and statically linked stuff
| are too big sometimes. Of course a 100MB go statically
| compiled binary has huge advantages now days.
| badsectoracula wrote:
| It is not about being able to make static binaries or
| really anything that has to do with anything technical. It
| is more of a cultural thing - the culture in some languages
| is to link dependencies dynamically (C/C++) whereas the
| culture in others is to link dependencies statically (Go,
| not sure about Rust).
|
| Personally i do not even write Go myself yet when i see
| some webapp made in Go i'm pretty much always sure that
| it'll be a self-contained static binary. Yes, there are
| probably exceptions (and i haven't surveyed all webapps
| made with Go) but it has been common enough to feel as the
| standard approach to me - and if i ever decide to make a
| binary webapp, i'll probably reach for Go to do it.
| alexpadula wrote:
| You can write git in any language, I don't see an advantage
| doing it in Rust besides the community and potential of
| promotion to that community.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| Sure, but we're talking about a git web UI with a little
| icing, not a git replacement (at least in most cases). Even
| so, Rust and Go web projects are much more lighterweight
| than projects in most other languages, with drastically
| less effort towards performance, and use less resources as
| a result, requiring less hardware to operate.
| 1dom wrote:
| You just responded to a comment giving a specific advantage
| that applies to Rust and a few other languages which
| doesn't apply to a large amount of other languages (single
| static binary).
|
| How can you still not see any advantage? Or was the point
| of your comment to say that you think the only real
| motivation is self or Rust promotion, suggesting some
| dishonesty amongst the people you're responding to?
| rvz wrote:
| Was going to point that out, as it is irrelevant, but I have
| seen something far worse.
|
| > 7. How does gitdot make money?
|
| > We don't.
|
| > We are fortunate enough to have raised a small pre-seed round
| from investors we are happy to call friends, and also to be at
| a point in our lives where we are financially independent and
| in good health.
|
| The founders of Artifact said the same thing. They had _no
| plan_ to make money and once they used their own capital they
| decided not to continue running it anymore (no-one else wanted
| to invest in Artifact).
|
| So it is only a matter of time until they eventually need to
| make money, raise money or shut it down.
| adamnemecek wrote:
| It is a killer feature. It tells me I can easily compile and
| edit the code myself.
| zellyn wrote:
| Oh stop being silly. Yes, the programming language is
| technically irrelevant in that they're all Turing complete.
|
| In reality, the programming language tells you all kinds of
| subtle things: probabilities about the way the software will
| feel to use, how stable it's likely to be, how fast, what the
| author is likely to focus on.
|
| I found one of the best jobs of my life in 2015 by asking
| "who's doing interesting things in Atlanta in Go?" Not because
| I was uncompromisingly settled on Go, but because in 2015,
| using Go (often) connoted a certain approach, a certain type of
| engineering, a certain constellation of values.
|
| So please stop pretending the whole gestalt of programming
| languages and their communities don't deeply affect the
| resulting software.
|
| (I say this with no unkindness intended, mostly to all of
| hackernews)
| lelanthran wrote:
| From what I can see, it would be more accurate if they wrote
| "slopped by LLMs" :-)
|
| I am indeed curious to see how an agent-coded project turns out
| in the long term.
|
| Coherencey from LLMs decreases as the source increases in
| volume, waiting to see how this all turns out.
| jm4 wrote:
| It's one of the first questions people will ask so it's
| probably worthwhile to mention it. I didn't get the impression
| they did so just because they thought rust was some kind of
| flex.
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| If the first thing people ask about your offering is "what
| programming language did you use when you made this," your
| offering is probably not that interesting.
| scared_together wrote:
| The offering in question is "A better GitHub" so you are
| correct. That is an actual quote from the FAQ [0] by the
| way.
|
| In comparison CodeBerg [1] and SourceHut [2] both offer Git
| hosting but don't merely describe themselves as "GitHub but
| X".
|
| [0] https://gitdot.io/faq
|
| [1] https://codeberg.org/
|
| [2] https://sourcehut.org/
| ottavio wrote:
| Yeah, rust programmers are the new software vegans.
|
| They claim it is better just because of the language, ignoring
| the features gap, the size of the team developing and
| supporting the software and not having solved any issue with
| the software they compete against.
|
| And to be clear, this in not in favour of GH, it is against the
| mentality that the programming language makes better products
| and programmers.
| Patryk27 wrote:
| > They claim it is better just because of the language
|
| I mean, it clearly is better (in certain contexts), see e.g.
| https://blog.google/security/rust-in-android-move-fast-
| fix-t...
|
| > We adopted Rust for its security and are seeing a 1000x
| reduction in memory safety vulnerability density compared to
| Android's C and C++ code. But the biggest surprise was Rust's
| impact on software delivery. With Rust changes having a 4x
| lower rollback rate and spending 25% less time in code
| review, the safer path is now also the faster one.
| ottavio wrote:
| Bugs are not only related to memory and a program cannot be
| considered safe Just because it got rid of pointers, malloc
| and free.
|
| If you really think that switching language is the main
| driver to get safe programs, the you are on the list of
| people replaceable by LLMs.
|
| Othewise you have to understand that architettural chioces,
| concurrency, (weak) cryptographic function and user
| stupidity have a significant impact, no matter what
| language you use. Memory management is just a part of the
| problem.
| Patryk27 wrote:
| > If you really think that switching language is the main
| driver to get safe programs [...]
|
| I didn't write that.
|
| > [...] the you are on the list of people replaceable by
| LLMs.
|
| lol, love a high quality discussion
|
| > Memory management is just a part of the problem.
|
| Sure, then using Rust is a step forward, because that's
| one less thing you have to worry about. Seat belts don't
| save all people, but a car equipped with seat belts is -
| on average - safer than a car without seat belts.
| olzhasar wrote:
| I was very excited about Rust prior to the LLM-era. I never
| managed to dive deep into it due to the lack of time, but was
| really planning to.
|
| Nowadays when everyone and their dog are either vibe-coding
| with Rust or constantly shouting about it's superiority, I've
| lost any interest in the language. I'm learning Zig.
| dudisubekti wrote:
| What? This doesn't make sense, how is it Rust's fault if
| people are being lazy and tribal?
| ClikeX wrote:
| It's not the fault of the language itself. But the
| behaviour gives people bad vibes, and they don't want to
| associate with the community anymore.
|
| Keep in mind. Learning a language usually also means you
| interact with the people in the ecosystem at some point.
| baq wrote:
| Interesting choice when LLMs remove one of the biggest
| barriers to entry for Rust which is you have to know almost
| all the rules to reliably make valid changes to Rust
| programs (which also helps LLMs at inference time when they
| make mistakes).
| saidnooneever wrote:
| It would be nice if they mentioned anyhting at all they are
| doing to implement security features. instead of leaning onf
| Rust which does absolutely nothing in that regard. just look
| owasp top 10 and observe it has nothing to do with memory
| safety. and thats just a top 10 of things.
|
| only for very few companies, memory safety issues are a thing.
| most of those dont use rust because it lacks tooling and
| certification paths -_-.
|
| rust is like AI and cloud. heavily marketed, not bad, but not
| as good as whats on the box -_-. it makes life usually harder
| for a lot of aspects (ofc cleverly avoid in publications about
| it -_-)
| johnisgood wrote:
| Yeah, this is what the people who have parroted "Rust is
| safe" have achieved. Rust is not "safe" in the broader sense
| of the word, only "memory safe". You have to implement the
| security yourself!
| thayne wrote:
| I suspect the fact that Github and Gitlab use ruby backends is
| a significant (although by no means the only) factor in the
| slowness of Github and Gitlab. So yes, being written in a
| language that is better suited for high performance at scale
| is, potentially, an advantage. Although if it is vibe coded,
| there's a decent chance there are architectural problems that
| offset the advantage gained from the choice in language.
| epolanski wrote:
| GitHub used to be great when the frontend too was in ruby,
| the react rework might've got somebody promoted but
| performance was never the same.
|
| GitHub is so data heavy and there's so little reactivity that
| it should really be server side rendered.
| IshKebab wrote:
| The frontend was Ruby?? Are you sure?
| pdpi wrote:
| As in rendered server-side.
| ClikeX wrote:
| Not literally. And I would hardly say it was a matter of
| language superiority. I love Ruby myself. But Github was
| a lot simpler when it was still just a Rails app.
|
| But Rails was SSR by default, and most of the frontend
| was just Embedded Ruby (ERB) template files all over the
| place. And way back when, it was even relatively common
| to use Javascript supersets like CoffeeScript[1] and
| Opal[2]. The latter being Ruby that compiled to JS.
|
| [1]: https://coffeescript.org/ [2]: https://opalrb.com/
| epolanski wrote:
| You can only do so if it is "written in Zig"
|
| /s, I love zig, but I'm consistently surprised of how popular
| any post containing zig in the title makes it to the front page
| almost daily, doesn't happen with any other language.
| kfrane wrote:
| When I see that, my first thought is that there are a bunch of
| features missing from the original.
| ClikeX wrote:
| But did you know Rust is memory safe?!
| alexpadula wrote:
| "Better" is a strong word without proven analysis or some kind of
| statistic, that honestly caught me off-guard as when you state
| that I expect something like a product like Bitbucket, obviously
| as you can imagine. Either way, cool project.
| jacobianhessian wrote:
| Nice. Also https://codex-infinity.com can do git hosting but
| isn't open source
| prosunpraiser wrote:
| Lookout - next they will rewrite the color blue in Rust and claim
| advantages.
| kbar13 wrote:
| "much better" in what way
| johntash wrote:
| fwiw when I opened the site, my fans spun up and firefox slowed a
| lot. No idea what it's doing, but it's definitely using a ton of
| cpu.
| jurschreuder wrote:
| Too bad it's written in Rust so I won't use it.
| hitoshi1964 wrote:
| Congrats on shipping this. Self-hosted + open source is exactly
| the combination I keep reaching for these days. Out of curiosity,
| how heavy is it to run -- could it run comfortably on an M1 Mac
| (16GB RAM)?
| andrewstuart wrote:
| It's weird that "written in Rust" is some sort of headline
| feature.
|
| It's like "baby on board" stickers on cars - why are you telling
| me that?
|
| Then again Rust is so complex maybe it's worth self
| congratulations.
| itsafarqueue wrote:
| What's that line about vegetarians? Like how do you know if
| someone's a vegetarian? They'll tell you. This, but Rust.
| linobino1 wrote:
| the domain is hard to speak... "git dot io" refers to git.io so
| you'll have to call it "git dot dot io"
| rashidae wrote:
| Does it have a CLI like github? Does it follow GIT? I made an
| account and did not migrate my repos, as I'd like to test this
| before moving in... Thanks in advance!
| kzdrenka wrote:
| I came to these comments to see if other people were annoyed by
| the "written in Rust" comment. Glad it's not just me
| dz0ny wrote:
| Fair point is actually "less is les here." It's more of an
| alternative to Gitea than to GitHub, where managing Git is almost
| an afterthought. Or maybe you haven't used GitHub recently. But
| sorry you cannot cal this better GitHub.
| dcreater wrote:
| Was excited until I found out this is a YC company. And a
| stereotypical one by the sound of it ("pivot hell" blah blah).
|
| If you're sell is being an unenshittified alternative to github,
| just give it time
| badsectoracula wrote:
| Well, for a more positive comment (since everything seems to be
| negative - and nobody brought that up) the site is very fast. In
| fact pretty much everything changes instantly when i click on
| stuff, which is very rare. The only exception seems to be when
| looking at some files with a long history (not sure why the
| history needs to be displayed by default though).
|
| That said, from a UX perspective, personally i prefer Forgejo -
| which isn't that much slower either (judging from Codeberg, it
| isn't instant but it is fast enough to feel "fast").
| Tepix wrote:
| Interesting design.
|
| Why rewrite from scratch? Wouldn't it be advantageous to start
| from an existing forge (there are many these days) and add a new
| UI?
| nutifafa wrote:
| I honestly do not see the point of all this. it has a font size
| problem for one, I can't see the edge it's confusing to use.
| whereistejas wrote:
| The UI is polarising, for sure. But, I will celebrate anyone who
| takes on the hard task of creating a new code forge. Best of
| luck!
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2026-06-09 08:00 UTC)