Zerostack – A Unix-inspired coding agent written in pure Rust

Posted by gidellav 8 hours ago

Zerostack – A Unix-inspired coding agent written in pure Rust(crates.io)

270 points | 95 commentspage 3

hparadiz 7 hours ago|

this is what I've been waiting for

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

nine_k 6 hours ago||

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.

onlyrealcuzzo 3 hours ago|||

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

gidellav 6 hours ago|||

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

nine_k 5 hours ago||

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.

schaefer 7 hours ago|||

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

-- So is deepseek-tui.

hparadiz 7 hours ago||

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

andxor 7 hours ago||

Codex is also opensource.

hparadiz 6 hours ago||

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.

gidellav 6 hours ago||

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

iknowstuff 7 hours ago||

Isn’t codex in rust?

rvz 2 hours ago||

yes.

slopinthebag 4 hours ago||

I love these. Coding agents aren't very difficult to build, it's a TUI + tools + getting a nice agent loop working. The hardest part seems to be supporting all of the different providers and model quirks. What is interesting is seeing the experimentation: some provide tons of tools, others provide a single python interpreter and have the agent use tools via sandboxed python scripts, others use minimal tools and lean on bash. Personally I want a harness that gives a ton of control to the user to let them steer the LLM, less agent and more augmentation. Maybe I'll have to build it myself. If anyone has ideas, let me know.

afzalive 2 hours ago|

Pi.dev is pretty good in giving tons of control to the use and has extensions that you can easily build.

Although people are complaining about its RAM usage in this thread, I haven't bothered to check how much RAM it uses.

sarim 2 hours ago||

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edgardurand 4 hours ago||

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phoebe_builds 4 hours ago||

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artem_am 6 hours ago||

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nimchimpsky 6 hours ago||

[dead]

brcmthrowaway 5 hours ago||

!RemindMe 6 months

andrew_kwak 5 hours ago||

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tencentshill 2 hours ago|

This may be the most HN post I have ever seen.