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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?

#71

Post by pjmlp »

delta_p_delta_x wrote: post #48
munchler wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks. That explains why OSs use the GPU for rendering windows and effects, but it's still not clear to me why a code editor would do the same. The features you list (transparency, glass effects, shadowing, window management, etc.) seem to be outside the purview of a text editor. If you're saying that Zed is built on something like Skia, then it would already be cross-platform and not have to worry about Vulkan vs.…

> but it's still not clear to me why a code editor would do the same. Happy to elaborate further. Old school text rendering began with a table of character codes to actual, fixed-size bitmaps (this was a font), and rendering was straightforward: divide the framebuffer resolution by the bitmap resolution, clip/wrap the remaining, just place the bitmaps into the resultant grid, and pipe the framebuffer to the display.…

Last point is kind of ironic, given that Metal is Objective-C with C++14 as shading language, Swift bidings, and a light C++ wrapper lib, Vulkan is C99 (tutorials use the C++20 bindings), DirectX is C++ with a COM based API.

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

#72

Post by delta_p_delta_x »

WD-42 wrote: post #61
delta_p_delta_x wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 d…

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

I install the Enterprise/Education versions.

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

#73

Post by LtWorf »

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.

If you write a very narrow category of high level server software or command line utilities.

Otherwise no.

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

#74

Post by hoistbypetard »

ben-schaaf wrote: post #69
leecommamichael wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Doesn't the blog post specifically say they are shipping their own glyph rasterizer?

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

#75

Post by WD-42 »

delta_p_delta_x wrote: post #72
WD-42 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 d…

> I don't know how people put up with it. It feels disrespectful. I install the Enterprise/Education versions.

No. I’ll install Linux which doesn’t make me the product.

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

#76

Post by starkrights »

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?

The zed blog has an early post[0] talking some about their decision. Mainly just decrying their experience of impossible-to-meet timing deadlines for something as basic as 60fps on electron.

It doesnt really do a tech breakdown of why it’d be impossible CPU side, but mentions a couple of things about their design process for it.

[0]: https://zed.dev/blog/videogame

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

#77

Post by delta_p_delta_x »

WD-42 wrote: post #75
delta_p_delta_x wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't know how people put up with it. It feels disrespectful. I install the Enterprise/Education versions.

No. I’ll install Linux which doesn’t make me the product.

Good for you.

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

#78

Post by jamwil »

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.

Some people work for large corporations and can’t just use whatever computer they want.

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

#79

Post by karunamurti »

delta_p_delta_x wrote: post #68
kermatt wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Isn't Skia controlled by Google?
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