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Zed for Windows: What's Taking So Long?

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Re: Zed for Windows: What's Taking So Long?

#51

Post by steve_adams_86 »

cholantesh wrote: post #43
steve_adams_86 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, there are good reasons developers are on Windows. Industrial and embedded systems are very often Windows-based, for better or worse. Heaps of games are developed on Windows. Windows-based software itself is developed on Windows.

As someone who's ambivalent about the experience, I'd say "because that's what my employer issued to me" is perfectly acceptable.

It's also probably one of the most common explanations for why anyone's using it. It's 70% of the market, and even more if you focus on enterprise. Us Linux and Mac folks are weirdos.

Re: Zed for Windows: What's Taking So Long?

#52

Post by Aeolun »

perching_aix wrote: post #36
WD-42 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd rather see another crappy, slow editor packaging an entire browser? Because that seems like what people are using for "cross platform toolkits" these days. I'm glad Zed is being ambitious, it's truly a joy to use because it feels native. And to be honest, it's Windows, who cares. If you are a developer you should have switched to Linux years ago anyway.

> If you are a developer you should have switched to Linux years ago anyway. This is so often repeated, but I genuinely don't understand why. Could you try selling me on it? I ended up going the sysadmin/devops route instead after college, but the more I learn about Linux, the less I understand why anyone would choose it for personal, active manual use. I can understand server deployments, it works well enough. It's…

Well, the thing I absolutely love about my linux setup, is that I can literally leave my computer running for a year, come back after that one year, and find it in exactly the state I left it. The system will never attempt to do anything for my own protection. No updates without me confirming them, never suddenly having it shut down because there’s a “critical” vulnerability. When it updates it never magically reverts a setting I had set.

Everything it does or doesn’t do is my responsibility.

Re: Zed for Windows: What's Taking So Long?

#53

Post by rstuart4133 »

steve_adams_86 wrote: post #35
inetknght wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Industrial and embedded systems are very often Windows-based I find Windows to be the outlier against a sea of embedded Linux devices. > Heaps of games are developed on Windows Inertia. > Windows-based software itself is developed on Windows. Plenty of Windows-based software is developed on Linux with Wine.

> I find Windows to be the outlier against a sea of embedded Linux devices. I think you're thinking of consumer devices, not industrial. > Inertia. I think that's a tough case to make. Windows offers legitimate technical advantages for gaming and game development. Integration with large vendors' tooling like NVIDIA and AMD is pretty huge. There are real workflow benefits. > Windows-based software itself is developed…

> I think you're thinking of consumer devices, not industrial.

Maybe he's thinking of more modern devices. There was a time when Microsoft flogged WinCE as an embedded solution, and yes a lot of people producing embedded stuff drank the kool aid.

I watched one instance of this happen first hand. They asked me what OS should they base their shiny new product (that I would be the first customer of), I said I would use some 'nix, but they should chose what they were comfortable with.

It turned out to be bad advice. They were comfortable with Windows desktop of course, so they chose WinCE. WinCE is not the stable WinNT they were familiar with, despite what Microsoft's marketing said. I've used a number of WinCE based devices in the past, they were all about as reliable as Windows 95/ME, which is to say most wouldn't last the day without rebooting.

In the end they could only get it working by shipping the product to a team in Germany that had access to the WinCE source. It cost them a small fortune, and lost them over a year. The delay lost me as a customer.

Most (I hope all, but it's never all) of todays experienced software engineers wouldn't make that mistake, but these people where (pretty good) hardware engineers, with a vision for a product they built the hardware for. Developing software was something you hired people to so for you, like plumbing and legal work. And they wanted those people to provide them with a familiar environment.

WinCE has long since been retired, or course. May it soul burn in hell. Yes, those same hardware engineers who insist on sticking to what they are familiar with might turn to Windows 11 instead. But that comes with costs - no ARM or other CPU's, huge resource requirements, insistence on TPM's, so little lack of control of the platform that you lose control of the USS Yorktown [0]. Those costs are large. In fact so large they would have overwhelmed the budget of my engineering friends years ago, and they would have just gone with Linux. I haven't seen a new embedded Windows design in quite a while, so I suspect that's true for most embedded projects now.

[0] https://archive.is/aKrml

Re: Zed for Windows: What's Taking So Long?

#54

Post by leecommamichael »

munchler wrote: post #30

I’m sure this is a dumb question, but why does a code editor need to render on the GPU like a video game? Is it just for niceties like smooth scrolling?

It doesn't need to. It's typical to do this these days, but they could still arrange all of the pixels on the CPU and then blit it onto the screen. There's an API to do so in every major OS.

Since it's more than quick enough to do this on the CPU, they're likely doing it for things like animations and very high quality font rendering. There's image-processing going on when you really care about quality; oversampling and filtering.

I suspect one could do most everything Zed does without a GPU, but about 10 to 20% uglier, depending on how discerning the user is on such things.

Re: Zed for Windows: What's Taking So Long?

#55

Post by leecommamichael »

pjmlp wrote: post #24
mxhwll wrote: post #4

This is why you don’t make your own cross platform toolkit.

Or why you don't insist in using Khronos stuff on Windows, when most OEMs only care about the native API, DirectX. Lets recap that this lesson has been learned by Godot developers, regarding their backends as well. The ICD mechanism is a kind of escape hatch leftover due to backwards compatibility, and even user mode drivers build on top of DirectX runtime infrastructure.

Is it Khronos? The 3 issues they linked were: 1. ARM support missing for one of their Cargo crates. 2. An issue with RemoteDesktop 3. The team required dynamic_rendering, and it wasn't available for user with an old machine on Windows 10.

It really depends how you define scope, but I don't think I would've taken on another GPU backend for that.

Re: Zed for Windows: What's Taking So Long?

#57

Post by ben-schaaf »

leecommamichael wrote: post #54
munchler wrote: post #30

I’m sure this is a dumb question, but why does a code editor need to render on the GPU like a video game? Is it just for niceties like smooth scrolling?

It doesn't need to. It's typical to do this these days, but they could still arrange all of the pixels on the CPU and then blit it onto the screen. There's an API to do so in every major OS. Since it's more than quick enough to do this on the CPU, they're likely doing it for things like animations and very high quality font rendering. There's image-processing going on when you really care about quality; oversampling…

> Since it's more than quick enough to do this on the CPU

This is true until it isn't. A modern-ish CPU at 1080p 60hz it'll be fine. At 4k 120hz even the fastest CPU on the market won't keep up. And then there's 8k.

> they're likely doing it for things like animations and very high quality font renderin

Since they're using native render functions this probably isn't the case.

Re: Zed for Windows: What's Taking So Long?

#58

Post by steve_adams_86 »

rstuart4133 wrote: post #53
steve_adams_86 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I find Windows to be the outlier against a sea of embedded Linux devices. I think you're thinking of consumer devices, not industrial. > Inertia. I think that's a tough case to make. Windows offers legitimate technical advantages for gaming and game development. Integration with large vendors' tooling like NVIDIA and AMD is pretty huge. There are real workflow benefits. > Windows-based software itself is developed…

> I think you're thinking of consumer devices, not industrial. Maybe he's thinking of more modern devices. There was a time when Microsoft flogged WinCE as an embedded solution, and yes a lot of people producing embedded stuff drank the kool aid. I watched one instance of this happen first hand. They asked me what OS should they base their shiny new product (that I would be the first customer of), I said I would use…

Sorry, it is my mistake. I was more so talking about software for working on industrial embedded devices (machinery, robots, or similar), which often use bespoke software for editing ladder logic or similar things for devices like PLCs.

I've never encountered a robot that didn't require windows to program. I know they're out there, but they don't seem common in my experience. Building them yourself is possible, but you regularly encounter cases where common, well-supported components require Windows to program. It's a drag.

I'd love to see it — Windows is far from my preferred OS. But my original point was essentially that there are tons of reasons like this which makes Windows a very productive and useful platform for many developers. I totally agree that there are cases where Linux or macOS are better (I prefer them both when possible) and yeah, WinCE was a total mess even by consumer standards. I had a pocket pc (ha, I was so excited about it) and it was a tremendous letdown largely because of the OS.

Side note, thanks for reminding me of that era. As bad as the software was, those devices were so god damn exciting. A pocket computer! I still remember how incredibly futuristic it felt.

Re: Zed for Windows: What's Taking So Long?

#59

Post by broodbucket »

steve_adams_86 wrote: post #35
inetknght wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Industrial and embedded systems are very often Windows-based I find Windows to be the outlier against a sea of embedded Linux devices. > Heaps of games are developed on Windows Inertia. > Windows-based software itself is developed on Windows. Plenty of Windows-based software is developed on Linux with Wine.

> I find Windows to be the outlier against a sea of embedded Linux devices. I think you're thinking of consumer devices, not industrial. > Inertia. I think that's a tough case to make. Windows offers legitimate technical advantages for gaming and game development. Integration with large vendors' tooling like NVIDIA and AMD is pretty huge. There are real workflow benefits. > Windows-based software itself is developed…

>Integration with large vendors' tooling like NVIDIA and AMD is pretty huge.

This is a product of inertia. If Windows didn't have inertia it wouldn't have ecosystem advantages, it's not inherent to Windows itself

Re: Zed for Windows: What's Taking So Long?

#60

Post by mudkipdev »

perching_aix wrote: post #36
WD-42 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd rather see another crappy, slow editor packaging an entire browser? Because that seems like what people are using for "cross platform toolkits" these days. I'm glad Zed is being ambitious, it's truly a joy to use because it feels native. And to be honest, it's Windows, who cares. If you are a developer you should have switched to Linux years ago anyway.

> If you are a developer you should have switched to Linux years ago anyway. This is so often repeated, but I genuinely don't understand why. Could you try selling me on it? I ended up going the sysadmin/devops route instead after college, but the more I learn about Linux, the less I understand why anyone would choose it for personal, active manual use. I can understand server deployments, it works well enough. It's…

Try compiling anything in C
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