Ghostty and libghostty are now on Zig 0.16! This was done by a [paid!] contributor. Through this process, the Ghostty non-profit also paid for hours to contribute over a dozen patches upstream to the translate-c and arocc projects which help the entire ecosystem. Amazing work. Zig 0.16 came out awhile ago, but in reality it wasn't a focus of the project to upgrade until the past few weeks. It did take a few weeks to upgrade, but the primary complexity was due to C translation/integration and not Zig itself. Zig 0.16 switched C translation from clang to the translate-c/arocc projects which are faster and a much smaller dependency. Ghostty is a very complex C user, consuming Apple headers (e.g. blocks), Windows headers, GTK headers, SIMD intrinsic headers, and more. This stressed these upstreams and we had to fix a number of issues to get through. This was high quality and good work though and I'm happy to see it help the ecosystem. translate-c and arocc are just excellent standalone projects even if you're not interested in Zig. They're way easier to embed than clang and solve that problem well. Upstream patches: * translate-c: * arocc:

Ghostty is getting automatic scrollback compression, resulting in 70 to 90% less physical memory usage. It happens incrementally when idle, so it had no measurable effect on IO throughput. I'm not aware of any other mainstream terminal that does this. Demo video below! The gains let us increase the default scrollback limit from 10MB to 50MB, because on average a full scrollback will still compress smaller than the prior limit. More history, for free. ("Unlimited", disk-paged history is on the roadmap too) Let's talk about cool implementation details, cause this was fun. First, the data structure and memory layout ("PageList") I wrote two years ago finally pays off! One of its traits is that screen memory is backed by a linked list of page-aligned, page-sized (or page-multiple-sized) blocks. Because each block is page-aligned and page-sized, we can use madvise to discard its physical backing while keeping the virtual address space reserved. Compressed pages therefore disappear from resident memory, but decompression is still guaranteed because the address space remains valid and we simply fault new pages back in as needed. We use the same trick for our memory pools, too. Unallocated pool pages don't count as resident memory, saving another couple of MB per terminal. This functionality is also available to libghostty-vt consumers via new `ghostty_terminal_compress` APIs. The consumer decides when the appropriate time to compress is and the APIs advise on compressability.

Ghost video...👻👻👻👻👻👻👻👻 Eyewitness states: Im tina a small town bartender and one of my regulars showed me this. They were at the bar when there camera recorded this and noone was home. Webster ma.

Ghostty is now indisputably the fastest terminal emulator at IO throughput, by a very large margin. On ASCII, Unicode, and CSI tests, Ghostty is more than 2x (double!) faster than any other leading "fast" terminal. These changes are directly in libghostty, too, so everyone wins. `time cat 150MB_ascii.txt`: - Ghostty nightly: 575ms - Ghostty 1.3.2: 1.5sec - Alacritty: 1.2sec - Kitty: 1.7sec - Warp: 3.8sec - iTerm2, Terminal: stopped after 60s `time cat 150MB_unicode.txt` (mixed languages): - Ghostty nightly: 536ms - Ghostty 1.3.2: 1.22sec - Alacritty: 1.05s - Kitty: 1.35s - Warp: 3.4s - iTerm2, Terminal: stopped after 60s `DOOM-Fire-Zig` (an IO test): - Ghostty nightly: 842fps - Ghostty 1.3.2: 532fps - Kitty: 485fps - Alacritty: 593fps - Warp: 577fps - iTerm2, Terminal: 60fps (yes, 60) To quickly address the "cat speed doesn't matter" naysayers: this is a direct test of how many bytes/second you can push through a terminal. It doesn't cover just "read big file" but also "how much can a TUI do". The tests above test various shapes of inputs (plain ascii, unicode/wide chars, csi-heavy loads, etc.). IO throughput is incredibly important. Most of these improvements apply to libghostty-vt consumers too, so any libghostty-based terminals will instantly see huge throughput improvements by simply upgrading (ABI compatible). I'll cover the exact improvements in a blog post in the future. These results are the result of 6 separate optimizations.