Comment by bieganski
5 hours ago
i wish there was an additional column in the table, that says "what problem does it solve". oh, and 'it's written in rust' does not count.
5 hours ago
i wish there was an additional column in the table, that says "what problem does it solve". oh, and 'it's written in rust' does not count.
“It’s written in Rust”
Actual LOL. Indeed. I was working for a large corporation at one point and a development team was explaining their product. I asked what its differentiators were versus our competitors. The team replied that ours was written in Go. #faceplam
The Rust rewrites can become tiresome, they have become a meme at this point, but there are really good tools there too.
An example from my personal experience: I used to think that oxipng was just a faster optipng. I took a closer look recently and saw that it is more than that.
See: https://op111.net/posts/2025/09/png-compression-oxipng-optip...
If a new tool has actual performance or feature advantages, then that's the answer to "what problem does it solve", regardless of what language it's in.
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That is a differentiator if your competitors are written in Python or Ruby or Bash or whatever. But yeah obviously for marketing to normal people you'd have to say "it's fast and reliable and easy to distribute" because they wouldn't know that these are properties of Go.
You can write slow unmaintainable brittle garbage in any language though. So even if your competition is literally written in Bash or whatever you should still say what your implementation actually does better - and if it's performance, back it up with something that lets me know you have actually measured the impact on real world use cases and are not just assuming "we wrote it in $language therefore it must be fast".
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No. The differentiator is whatever benefits such an implementation might deliver (e.g., performance, reliability, etc.). Customers don’t start whipping out checkbooks when you say, “Ours is written in Go.”
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Many of the entries do include this detail — e.g. "with syntax highlighting", "ncurses interface", and "more intuitive". I agree that "written in rust", "modern", and "better" aren't very useful!
Some of this just makes me think that they are compared against the wrong tool though. E.g.
> cat clone with syntax highlighting and git integration
doesn't make any sense because cat is not really meant for viewing files. You should be comparing your tool with the more/less/most family of tools, some of which can already do syntax highlighting or even more complex transforms.
Yup, I made that same point in another comment. Out of interest, though, how do you get syntax highlighting from any of those pagers? None of them give it to me out of the box.
Also using a non GPL license does not count.
A lot of those tools are also usable on windows thats why i like them.