Rust-Powered Editing at 120fps

Key Takeaways

So zed is our attempt at building the world's greatest code editor. And for me what that meant after working on this problem for probably 15 years was performance needed to be absolutely amazing. We created the atom editor previously and as part of Adam the shell around atom electron was spun out into its own thing and electron is what VS Code is built on and a bunch of other apps. And basically the premise of Electron is you're going to build your desktop application as if it's a web page and then kind of dress it up in its own uh application shell or whatever to look like a desktop app, but it's essentially a web app. And we were really frustrated with kind of the ceiling that using web technology put on how excellent of a user experience we could deliver. Um, and that had to do with sort of raw text rendering quality and performance. Zed runs at 120 frames a second reliably delivering frames. And so there's just like a fundamentally more fluid experience using it that we just couldn't achieve in web tech. So we basically rather than building zed like a web page, we built it more like a video game. We went down and ran code on the graphics hardware directly and engineered from there for the system to be incredibly performant. It's our opportunity to advance the state-of-the-art on editing generally. So bunch of investment not only in how fast things move but also really sophisticated indexed primitives for text that allows to do things like nonlinear undo tracking the causal history of change over time with CRDTS real-time collaborative editing and we've essentially engineered an entire editor from an empty repo uh to up to about over half a million lines of Rust engineered the entire IDE