libghostty is FAST! Here's a look at vtebench with Ghostling. Reminder: Ghostling is single threaded + blocking render + blocking IO. The point is, you get comparable speed to the fastest dedicated terminals in an embeddable lib! Had to pull out iTerm2 because its so slow.
Warning: Ghostling is purple in the first chart but green in the second. Sorry for the confusion.
Also, the Unicode results are not correct for Ghostling because Ghostling is getting stuck on worst case "glyph not found" since we only embed one font. So the results are wildly skewed poorly. A result integrator of libghostty would have significantly better performance here.
I haven't fully profiled the libghostty C API yet. I think there will be obvious wins to be had. This was just my first check and I am very happy with the results.
Comparing libghostty/Ghostling to dedicated terminals is a bit unfair, since dedicated terminals can get away with a lot of performance tricks to go faster that a reusable general purpose terminal emulation library can't do as well. But, I wanted to show this comparison to show that despite that, libghostty still does SUPER well, comparable, and even best-in-class in a couple categories.
This is all to say, every embedded terminal experience on earth can be nearly as fast as the fastest native desktop terminals. There are no more excuses. The tide will rise!
Full Ghostling source (single ~600 line C file): https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostling