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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?

#61

Post by WD-42 »

delta_p_delta_x wrote: post #38
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.

> Plenty of Windows-based software is developed on Linux with Wine The overwhelming majority of software written against MinGW (or worse, Cygwin) are bad/lazy ports of Linux-first software. Case in point: Git and Perl, both of which drag along an entire coreutils ecosystem ( each , so you have two copies of `ls`) along with the main binaries. First-class Windows programs that are used every day like Office, Chromium…

Ironically it was the act of doing that: spinning up a VM to test a release on Windows, which really turned me against it forever. During installation, I counted 4 un-skippable EULAS about "sharing data" and then asked me what my ad preferences were. To add insult to injury once I finally did get it installed, the start menu was full of Xbox apps and the taskbar had some news headline about the Kardashians on it.

I don't know how people put up with it. It feels disrespectful.

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

#62

Post by leecommamichael »

ben-schaaf wrote: post #57
leecommamichael wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I’m almost nerd-sniped enough to try and see exactly where it breaks down.

What’s a native render function? Do you mean just using a graphics API as opposed to an off-the-shelf UI library?

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

#63

Post by pjmlp »

leecommamichael wrote: post #55
pjmlp wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In the sense that OpenGL and Vulkan are paper standards that OEMs might implement, whereas they tend to design their DirectX drivers alongside Microsoft, and then their OpenGL/Vulkan drivers are mostly an afterthought.

This is especially visible when buying random asian cards that aren't the reference designs from AMD and NVidia. Intel was never great regardless of the API.

Additionally we have the usual extension spaghetti, which is one thing that has beaten them here.

Require too many of them, and coding around their inexistence becomes like using yet another API, that is similar but not quite.

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

#64

Post by psyclobe »

steve_adams_86 wrote: post #22
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.

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.

Was a windows dev for 20 years-but then I got a job where I didn’t have to use that ad infested joke of an operating system.

Never going back.

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

#65

Post by wolvesechoes »

skydhash wrote: post #39
perching_aix wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Not selling you on it, as I find that, if you're using IDEs, OSes don't really matter. And windows can be actually beneficial as you'll get prime support from most vendors. Where Unix shine is adhoc automation. Almost everything is fully hackable and that makes some solution easier to implement. As in case for the desktop, you can switch out your audio stack, alter the display of any element and many other things. Us…

> if you're using IDEs, OSes don't really matter

Unless you are using Visual Studio that blews out every other IDE out of the water if you consider debugging and profiling experience.

> As in case for the desktop, you can switch out your audio stack, alter the display of any element and many other things. Using windows is borrowing some shoes while Linux can be your favorite slipper.

Ah yes, biggest Linux advantage - being a mud hut.

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

#66

Post by wolvesechoes »

WD-42 wrote: post #20
mxhwll wrote: post #4

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

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.

> You'd rather see another crappy, slow editor packaging an entire browser?

Windows still offers other options, even if MS itself tend to ignore them.

> If you are a developer you should have switched to Linux years ago anyway.

Developers is much broader set than web developers, and even then advantages of Linux escape me.

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

#67

Post by wolvesechoes »

mudkipdev wrote: post #60
perching_aix wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Are you saying that it is somehow complicated to press Build in the VS window?

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

#68

Post by delta_p_delta_x »

kermatt wrote: post #56
mxhwll wrote: post #4

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

What should they have used instead?

As mentioned here... Probably Skia, which would've saved them the effort of writing any GPU backend, let alone three.

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

#69

Post by ben-schaaf »

leecommamichael wrote: post #62
ben-schaaf wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I’m almost nerd-sniped enough to try and see exactly where it breaks down. What’s a native render function? Do you mean just using a graphics API as opposed to an off-the-shelf UI library?

> What’s a native render function?

As in using DirectWrite or GDI on Windows; or Core Text on macOS. As opposed to shipping your own glyph rasterizer.

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

#70

Post by pjmlp »

vovavili wrote: post #46
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. These days, WSL2 effectively eliminates a need for that for most developers.

And cheaper than VM Workstation, or easier than Virtual Vox, my solutions since 2010, I never dual booted again in 15 years.
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