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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

#151

Post by skydhash »

the__alchemist wrote: post #120
gigatexal wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get the question. albeit in vim I use just the navigation things and selectors and s/../.. to replace stuff I am probably using something like 1% of it's power.

I'm asking how to move a function, or class to a different module (including its methods, imports throughout the project etc), as an example of IDE-101 stuff I can't figure out how to do in Zed, and makes me think Zed might [i]not[/i] be a replacement.

That’s a code intellisense feature set, not part of the core set of an editor. Especially when you have dynamic module loading. An IDE only focus on a few languages and it makes sense for them to have that capability.

Re: Zed editor switching graphics lib from blade to wgpu

#152

Post by jsheard »

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!

Vulkano is a somewhat higher level library which aims to be safe and idiomatic. It looks like it generates its own Vulkan bindings directly from the vk.xml definitions, but it also depends on Ash, and this comment suggests that both generators need to be kept in sync so they're effectively beholden to Ash's release cadence anyway.

https://github.com/vulkano-rs/vulkano/blob/master/Cargo.toml...

Maybe that's so they can interop with other crates which use Ash's types?

Re: Zed editor switching graphics lib from blade to wgpu

#153

Post by TiredOfLife »

fishgoesblub wrote: post #41

I hope this can somehow improve the font situation. Even on a 1440p monitor, the fonts in Zed are much blurrier than any other editor I've used. I Can't even use bitmap fonts like VSCode.

https://zed.dev/releases/stable#:~:text=Improved%20editor%20...

Fixed last october

Re: Zed editor switching graphics lib from blade to wgpu

#154

Post by adastra22 »

andypants wrote: post #115
adastra22 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He definitely did not name it. IRIS GL was termed “immediate mode” back in the 80’s.

He coined the term in the context of UI, by borrowing the existing term that was already used in graphics. Drawing that parallel was the point.

It might be more accurate to say that he repopularized the term among a new generation of developers. Immediate vs Retained mode UI was just as much a thing in early GUIs.

It was a swinging pendulum. At first everything was immediate mode because video RAM was very scarce. Initially there was only enough VRAM for the frame buffer, and hardly any system RAM to spare. But once both categories of RAM started growing, there was a movement to switch to retained mode UI frameworks. It wasn’t until the early 00’s that GPUs and SIMD extensions tipped the scales in the other direction - it was faster to just re-render as needed rather than track all these cached UI buffers, and allowed for dynamic UI motifs “for free.”

My graying beard is showing though, as I did some gave dev in the late 90’s on 3Dfx hardware, and learned UI programming on Win95 and System 7.6. Get off my lawn.

Re: Zed editor switching graphics lib from blade to wgpu

#155

Post by tribaal »

chiffaa wrote: post #53
IshKebab wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.boringcactus.com/2025/04/13/2025-survey-of-rust-... I started writing a program that needed to have a table with 1 million rows. This means it needs to be virtualised. Pretty common in GUI libraries. The only Rust GUI library I found that could do this easily was gpui-component ( https://github.com/longbridge/gpui-component ). It also renders text crisply (rules out egui), looks nice with the default styl…

I believe latest Iced versions do have a `Lazy` widget wrapper, but I believe that effectively means you need to make your own virtual list on top of it

Custom widgets aren’t particularly hard to do in iced, but I wish some of those common cases would be committed back / made available.

Except the above virtualised lists, another case I hit was layered images (sprites for example). Not very hard to write my own, sure, but it’d be nice to have that out of the box as in eg. egui

Re: Zed editor switching graphics lib from blade to wgpu

#156

Post by kbelder »

api wrote: post #78
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

Open source GUI development is perpetually cursed by underestimating the difficulty of the problem. A mature high-quality GUI with support for all the features of a modern desktop UI, accessibility, support for all the display variations you encounter in the wild, high quality rendering, high performance, low overhead, etc. is a development task on par with creating a mature game engine like Unity. Nearly all open so…

You're right, and I think that's because the core functionality of a UI lib is not too difficult. I've tinkered in that space myself, and it's a fun side project.

Then you start to think about full unicode support, right-to-left rendering, and so on. Then you start to think about properly implementing accessibility features. The necessary work increases by a magnitude. And it's not fun work. So you stall out with a bare-bones implementation.

Re: Zed editor switching graphics lib from blade to wgpu

#157

Post by okanat »

tribaal wrote: post #131
righthand wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :)

Has System76 started designing, or more correctly outsourcing more expensive custom motherboard designs, like Lenovo and Dell or are they still selling slightly customized white-label laptops?

Re: Zed editor switching graphics lib from blade to wgpu

#158

Post by the__alchemist »

gigatexal wrote: post #148
the__alchemist wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm asking how to move a function, or class to a different module (including its methods, imports throughout the project etc), as an example of IDE-101 stuff I can't figure out how to do in Zed, and makes me think Zed might [i]not[/i] be a replacement.

Ahh got it. Yeah im not sure but maybe there’s a discord or irc for folks to help with that who use zed. Even Reddit maybe?

Good calls! I haven't fully wrung this out, and want to like Zed, especially on my tablet. (Not too fast, and uses battery)

Re: Zed editor switching graphics lib from blade to wgpu

#159

Post by littlestymaar »

flohofwoe wrote: post #32

Seeing that the author of Blade (kvark) isn't exactly a 3D API newbie and also worked on WebGPU I really wonder if a switch to wgpu will actually have the desired long term effect. A WebGPU implementation isn't exactly slim either, especially when all is needed is just a very small 3D API wrapper specialized for text rendering.

Kvark was leading the engineering effort for wgpu while he was at Mozilla.

But he was doing that on his work time and did so collaborating with other Mozilla engineers, whereas AFAIK blade has been more of a personal side project.

Re: Zed editor switching graphics lib from blade to wgpu

#160

Post by delta_p_delta_x »

the__alchemist wrote: post #106
jsheard wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Rust GUI is in a tough spot right now with critical dependencies under-staffed and lots of projects half implemented. Down the stack, low-level 3D acceleration is in a rough spot too unfortunately. The canonical Rust Vulkan wrapper (Ash) hasn't cut a release for nearly two years, and even git main is far behind the latest spec updates.

I am not convinced a thin FFI wrapper needs frequent updates, pending updates to the underlying API. What updates do you think it should have?

vk.xml[1] is the canonical Vulkan specification; this is updated essentially weekly.

The C++ equivalent, Vulkan-Hpp[2], follows extremely closely behind. Plus, ash isn't just an FFI wrapper; it does quite a bit of RAII-esque state and function pointer management that is generally required for Vulkan.

[1]: https://github.com/KhronosGroup/Vulkan-Docs/blob/main/xml/vk...

[2]: https://github.com/KhronosGroup/Vulkan-Hpp/

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