Show HN: I built a fast RSS reader in Zig(github.com)

73 pointsby superstarryeyes2 days ago9 comments

nhanb6 minutes ago
>And for the UI I just pipe everything to the system's "less" command.
I never thought of that as an option. Thanks for the tip haha.
vqtska9 minutes ago
This looks kinda scary to me considering that Zig isn't a safe language and it's being used here to parse untrusted data from the internet. Would the ReleaseSafe mode that Zig provides prevent any attempts of exploiting memory safety bugs?
renegat0x0an hour ago
It is a fine project to limit 'doomscrolling', but I think the premise is wrong.
- I have created my own RSS readers, that contains 500+ sources. I do not doom scroll
- doom scrolling appears when social media algorithm feeds you data, even from a month ago
- I have various filters so I can browse whatever I want
So RSS should just have filters, categories, search extensive capabilities to solve doom scrolling, and on the other hand it will be able to provide you extensive amounts of data.
cefboud28 minutes ago
The human psychology is intriguing. The more I see "... Zig ..." the stronger the urge to learn and build something with it becomes. In practice, though, I've found that building things with languages I am familiar with is more enjoyable for me, personally.
A severe case of mimetic desire. I suspect a lot of devs suffer from it.
renegat0x0an hour ago
If anyone is interested in RSS feeds, here are mine in SQLite table:
https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-feeds
A1aM09 hours ago
The 'once a day' fetching limitation is a fascinating idea. It really captures the vibe of reading a physical newspaper in the morning rather than constantly checking for updates. I think many of us could use a tool that enforces a bit of 'digital silence' like this.
- mocheeze8 hours ago
  In middle school (age 11-13 in the late '90s, USA) I had a hand-me-down Palm Pilot (probably upgraded to Handspring in there). I'd leave it on my serial(?) port cradle and have it download my daily news from sites like IGN and Slashdot over 56K before I woke up. I was also the kid that regularly read the "Time Life for Kids" mags they'd pass out to us in homeroom. That's the outlet I learned about Napster from and hooked my school onto. Your comment reminded me of those days. Now I'm still desperately hooked on RSS since the early days.
  ETA: When I was a late teen I ended up managing a bunch of younger teams for a free mod for an indie PC game called Blockland. I had them code up IRC and RSS capabilities into the mod from scratch in the Torque Game Engine's custom TorcueScript. I couldn't believe what those kids were capable of. They all went into programming, engineering, or founding their own companies out of highschool and college. If one of them told me something was impossible I'd just tell them that I saw that a competing mod already figured it out. Magically my dudes had a solution really quick lol. Sometimes when you have limited resources and/or experience the old and proven ways are just as good.
  Was great when they had all that XML experience in a weird scripting language and I asked them to implement Jabber in-game from my Dreamhost shared-hosting plan. Crazy what a bunch of teens can do for an online Lego-like game.
  Thanks for letting this older dude wax nostalgic off the rails. Hope it reminds others on HN about early hacking days like OP's project.
  - A1aM06 hours ago
    Love it. It’s funny how we are now building modern tools just to try and get back that simple 'Palm Pilot morning read' vibe.
- PMunch3 hours ago
  I've been wanting a browser plugin like this for ages. Basically tell it which sites to limit, then once loaded it won't re-load for a certain amount of time, or until the next day (not necessarily 24 hours). This way there is no reason to keep checking the news, they won't change.
- endorphine3 hours ago
  Kagi News does something similar, for what it's worth.
  - mbirth2 hours ago
    I’m currently evaluating whether I’m happy with Kagi News in my RSS reader compared to separate news outlets. So far it seems to capture all the important bits.
lknutha day ago
I think its cool that more people are building what I call "calm tech". More technology should try to serve a purpose quickly and then get out of the way instead of trying to artificially stay on your screen as long as possible.
Incidentally, I built my own calm RSS reader some time ago that has many similar ideas to yours: https://github.com/lukasknuth/briefly
- ekjhgkejhgka day ago
  https://newsboat.org/
  - sbinnee4 hours ago
    The best RSS reader program I have been using for years
- superstarryeyesa day ago
  nice! yeah, i agree. calm tech is a nice way to put it. the current big platforms are highly tuned to keep people engaged and enraged to the max, rss is kind antithesis of that. that's probably why big companies try to bury and hide it. youtube and reddit still give pretty good rss support though, which is nice.
keyle5 hours ago
Nice work, I did mine in C, using Termbox2, in a very suckless fashion (config.h & make install)
I like the idea of the daily digest.
That gave me a good chuckle:
```
    Starts in milliseconds and parses hundreds of items in seconds.
```
Consider having a shortcut to load a feed item's comments in the browser, if that's not already there.
ekjhgkejhgka day ago
Why MIT and not GPL3?
- superstarryeyesa day ago
  why not? isn't mit just objectively a better license for open source? i just hope rss would make a comeback to make the internet a little saner again, and if someone wants to use hys source code as a base for their own rss reader, whether commercial or not, great!
  - palataan hour ago
    Copyleft licences "care about the user" as in "as a user, I want you to be able to patch the code you run so I enforce it in my licence". It's a different philosophy from permissive licences that say "companies can use them in their closed, proprietary product, I just want them to mention somewhere that they use my code". Note that more often than not, those using permissive licences don't even bother to follow that simple rule.
    As a user, I'm happier with copyleft. I like to take my Marshall smart speaker as an example: that thing doesn't get any updates, ever. But it connects to the Internet. The app absolutely sucks, the connectivity is passable at best (often frustrating), but the hardware itself is nice (it looks nice in my living room and the sound is good when it works).
    If all the open source software running inside that thing was GPLv3, Marshall would have to provide me with a way to patch it. So at the very least I could make security updates myself. But because Marshall used permissively-licenced dependencies, they locked it down in such a way that I can't do that.
    The permissive licence helped Marshall, but for me as a user, the code may as well be proprietary.
    palataan hour ago
    It also has an impact on contribution. In my experience with small open source projects, if I licence my library permissively, people will almost never contribute or open source anything. They will gladly ask for bugfixes and features, though.
    If I use a copyleft licence (I like EUPL or MPLv2), it doesn't mean that they will open clean PRs, but at least they have to publish their changes in their own fork. It has happened to me that I could go read a fork, find a few things that were interesting and bring them back to my project.
    With permissive licences, the risk is that those (typically businesses) who keep their fork open source probably don't see a lot of value in their fork, otherwise they would have made it private, "just in case".
  - ekjhgkejhgka day ago
    Explain what you mean by "objectively better"? Your response makes it sound like you don't know the difference and are doing it because everybody else does it. It also makes it sounds like you don't understand the difference between open source software and free software. Both are free licenses, open source is just one part of it.
    The main difference is that GPL3 is a copyleft license, whereas MIT is not. Meaning that legally there is nothing in the license preventing a company from taking your code and using it for their purposes without having to contribute to improve the code.
    superstarryeyesa day ago
    i know the difference. i use gpl3 in my other project lue for example. i meant objectively better for the open source community. the spread of new ideas benefits from the mit license because the ideas in the code can travel farther.
    the reason i picked mit is because rss is in a rough spot right now. the tech isn't mainstream, and big companies are trying to squash it since it doesn't drive engagement like the infinite scroll. anything that helps rss move forward is a win, and the mit license makes that easier.
    ekjhgkejhgka day ago
    Ok thank you for explaining.
    > the reason i picked mit is because rss is in a rough spot right now.
    I don't think another client is the solution, just saying. There's about three billion of them out there (though I don't dispute that yours might have something unique).