Show HN: Shitty – fast terminal. Memory-unsafe and faster than yours
A new terminal emulator called 'Shitty' has been released, emphasizing extreme performance and low latency through GPU-accelerated rendering. The project is written in C++23 and prioritizes speed over memory safety.
Why it matters
It represents a niche trend in software development where developers trade safety for raw performance in low-level system tools.
Blazingly fast. Memory-unsafe and faster than yours.
Shitty is built for low latency, fast startup, and predictable resource use. It keeps terminal state on the CPU and renders cells with native compute backends: Vulkan on Linux and Metal on macOS.
100MB catted through the GUI on an Apple-silicon MacBook, every terminal equalized first: Menlo 12pt, the same 14x28px cell, an 80x24 grid, 500 lines of scrollback. Best wall time of three runs.
Random bytes (the parser's worst case, invalid UTF-8 throughout):
kitty sits the random payload out: it reacts to the embedded escape junk with title changes and bells instead of drawing. Reproduce with dev/compare.py , which verifies the equalized setup from inside every terminal before measuring anything.
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