Nathan Sobo recently open-sourced Zed, a code editor that focuses on performance, integrates AI capabilities, and supports software teams’ collaboration out of the box. For performance, Zed leverages a Rust code base, multicore- and GPU-optimized code, with a custom Rust GUI framework. For collaboration, Zed relies on CRDTs and team channels. Zed is currently Mac only.
they’ve written a custom GPU framework to achieve the performance the level of performance they have. it’s currently only compatible with macos, but is being ported to other operating systems.
How much GPU performance do you need for text?
For sure. If 32-year-old vim can handle multi-GB files smoothly, you don’t need a GPU.
I remember when we ran text editors on a turnip. It wasn’t much but we were happy.
Why in the world wouldn’t you just use Vulkan? Then it would still be portable to other platforms with probably still good performance, no?
vulkan is a graphics api, not a framework. their framework is using vulkan.
If their framework is using Vulkan, why is it not compatible with anything but MacOS? Isn’t the point of Vulkan that it’s cross platform?
It’s not fundamentally incompatible, they just haven’t written the code to make it compatible yet. GPU frameworks need a lot of OS specific code, so it will take some time for them to make it run perfectly on Linux.
This is wrong. Their framework uses metal, which is an apple only graphics API.
My bad, I was referring to the new Linux implementation which is using Vulkan, which was not clear. The MacOS implementation only supports Metal, as MacOS does not support Vulkan natively. I assume the Vulkan implementation will also be what is used for the Windows build.