PERFORMANCE Signal 458
Show HN: Shitty – fast terminal. Memory-unsafe and faster than yours
For engineers working heavily in terminals, a demonstrably faster terminal with lower latency and predictable resource use directly improves daily workflow. The project shows that bypassing generic windowing toolkits in favor of native GPU APIs yields measurable throughput gains, though the memory-unsafe C++23 foundation trades safety guarantees for that speed.
Written by elseif from the cluster below · every claim links back to a sourceThe three things worth knowing
Shitty outperforms alacritty, kitty, and ghostty on printable ASCII throughput (~118 MiB/s vs ~99 MiB/s for alacritty) and handles random byte payloads significantly faster (~51 MiB/s vs ~31 MiB/s for alacritty).
The terminal renders cells via native compute backends—Vulkan on Linux and Metal on macOS—using lazy glyph rasterization, a persistent GPU glyph cache, and damage-driven compute rendering rather than a generic windowing toolkit.
It implements broad terminal emulation coverage including VT52 through VT5xx controls, xterm extensions, Unicode grapheme clusters, multiple keyboard and mouse protocols, and synchronized output.
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