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Zed editor switching graphics lib from blade to wgpu

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Re: Zed editor switching graphics lib from blade to wgpu

#131

Post by tribaal »

righthand wrote: post #107
satvikpendem wrote: post #42

Zed also stopped GPUI (their GPU accelerated Rust UI framework) development for now, sadly. > Hey y'all, GPUI develoment is getting some major brakes put on it. We gotta focus on some business relevant work in 2026, and so I'm going to be pushing off anything that isn't directly related to Zed's use case from now on. However, Nate, former employee #1 at Zed, has started a little side repo that people can keep iterati…

Iced.rs is probably the better UI library anyways in the long run as it’s backed by a major hardware vendor. https://iced.rs

Not contesting your claim, but would you mind sharing what major hardware vendor you mean?

I love iced and wrote a decent amount of code using it, but in my mind the biggest sponsor is system76 - and as awesome as they are they aren’t a major vendor yet :)

Re: Zed editor switching graphics lib from blade to wgpu

#133

Post by mort96 »

net_ wrote: post #129

In 2020, I started working on a (C++) game engine. Since the only decent open-source UI option was Dear ImGui (which was obviously a bad choice for consumer-facing UIs), I ended up rolling my own retained-mode UI library on top of SDL. Now, it's fully-featured enough that I rarely have to touch it. There's even a major company using it for embedded products. I don't get why every language's community doesn't just do…

How's the accessibility?

Re: Zed editor switching graphics lib from blade to wgpu

#134

Post by lazypenguin »

piker wrote: post #4

Rust GUI is in a tough spot right now with critical dependencies under-staffed and lots of projects half implemented. I think the advent of LLMs has been timed perfectly to set the ecosystem back for a few more years. I wrote about it, and how it affected our development yesterday: https://tritium.legal/blog/desktop

Your recent post resonated with me deeply, as someone heavily invested in the Rust GUI I've fallen into this same conundrum. I think ultimately the Rust GUI ecosystem is still not mature and as a consequence we have to make big concessions when picking a framework.

I also came to a similar endpoint when building out a fairy large GUI application using egui. While egui solves the "draw widgets" part of building out the application, inevitably I had to restructure my app entirely with a new architecture to make it maintainable. In many places the "immediate" nature of the GUI mutable editing the state was no longer an advantage. Not to mention that UI code I wrote 6 months ago became difficult to read, especially if there was advanced layout happening.

Ultimately I've boiled my choices down to:

- egui for practicality but you pay the price in architecture + styling

- iced for a nice architecture but you have to roll all your own widgets

- slint maybe one day once they make text rendering a higher priority but even then the architecture side is not solved for you either

- tauri/dioxus/electron if you're not a purist like me

- Rewind 20 years and use Qt/WPF/etc.

Re: Zed editor switching graphics lib from blade to wgpu

#135

Post by the__alchemist »

hickelpickle wrote: post #130
jsheard wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The underlying Vulkan API is updated constantly, the last spec update was about two weeks ago. Even if we only count the infrequent major milestone versions, Ash is still stuck at Vulkan 1.3, when Vulkan 1.4 launched in December of 2024.

Damn, I just dove back into a vulkan project I was grinding through to learn graphics programing, life and not having the time to chase graphic programming bugs led me to put it aside for a year and a half and these new models were able to help me squash my bug and grok things fully to dive back in, but I never even consider that the rust vulkan ecosystem was worse off. it was already an insane experience getting img…

Vulkano? I remember that! Looks like it was updated last week, but I don't know if it's current with the Vulkan API, nor how it generally compares to Ash.

WGPU + Winit + EGUI + EGUI component libs is its own joy of compatibility, but anecdotally they have been updating in reasonable sync. things can get out of hand if you wait too long between updates though!

Re: Zed editor switching graphics lib from blade to wgpu

#136

Post by nu11ptr »

tuzemec wrote: post #92
nu11ptr wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does Zed have cursor-like tab completion yet?

Yes: https://zed.dev/docs/ai/edit-prediction

Thanks. Have you used cursor or copilot (recently, tab completion has gotten better)? I'm curious how this compares in actual performance. Last time I used Zed, this was a showstopper as the completions were much worse (though if I configure it to use copilot as my source, I guess it should perform the same as VsCode?).

Re: Zed editor switching graphics lib from blade to wgpu

#137

Post by kitsune1 »

laweijfmvo wrote: post #104
satvikpendem wrote: post #42

Zed also stopped GPUI (their GPU accelerated Rust UI framework) development for now, sadly. > Hey y'all, GPUI develoment is getting some major brakes put on it. We gotta focus on some business relevant work in 2026, and so I'm going to be pushing off anything that isn't directly related to Zed's use case from now on. However, Nate, former employee #1 at Zed, has started a little side repo that people can keep iterati…

> We gotta focus on some business relevant work in 2026 Remember that post announcing the millions of VC capital they raised? This is the result

[dead]

Re: Zed editor switching graphics lib from blade to wgpu

#138

Post by satvikpendem »

koito17 wrote: post #127
satvikpendem wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without such venture capital, I doubt GPUI, at least to the level of complexity it has today rather than being a toy project, would have even existed. It costs money to develop open source sustainably.

GPUI development predates Sequoia's funding by about two years.

Companies start with founders funding themselves through savings and friends and family rounds before institutional investors are usually even interested. But make no mistake, they start it as a commercial venture, otherwise they wouldn't have taken VC in the first place, nevermind that VCs wouldn't have funded it if not for their pitch on how it could become a billion dollar company.

And since Sequoia? It is primarily the Zed team working full time on it, which costs money.

Re: Zed editor switching graphics lib from blade to wgpu

#139

Post by [deleted] »

the__alchemist wrote: post #135
hickelpickle wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Damn, I just dove back into a vulkan project I was grinding through to learn graphics programing, life and not having the time to chase graphic programming bugs led me to put it aside for a year and a half and these new models were able to help me squash my bug and grok things fully to dive back in, but I never even consider that the rust vulkan ecosystem was worse off. it was already an insane experience getting img…

Vulkano? I remember that! Looks like it was updated last week, but I don't know if it's current with the Vulkan API, nor how it generally compares to Ash. WGPU + Winit + EGUI + EGUI component libs is its own joy of compatibility, but anecdotally they have been updating in reasonable sync. things can get out of hand if you wait too long between updates though!

[deleted]
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