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Zed DeltaDB

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Re: Zed DeltaDB

#161

Post by badsectoracula »

senderista wrote: post #139
dlisboa wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There should be a concept called "engineering privilege". I see some companies do things that are widely out of their core product and engineers there just having fun with a bunch of different stuff with seemingly no commitment to bring in revenue. They'll re-invent/re-write things constantly, write a new compiler/package manager for their chosen language, create new frameworks, new open source projects unrelated to…

My favorite example was from Joel Spolsky's company, where bright engineers got bored with working on bug tracking software so they wrote their own C# compiler.

You mean wasabi or whatever it was called?

It may seem weird nowadays but at the time it made sense since wasabi was "transpiling" VBScript (on which their existing codebase was written since they were all into Microsoft products at the time) to other languages in environments where VBScript didn't exist (e.g. IIRC they could transpile to PHP - and there isn't "one" PHP).

They were basically making shrink-wrap software running on an environment (the web) that wasn't made for shrink-wrap software (especially at the time) and came up with a technical solution to it.

FWIW they weren't the only to attempt something like that. HaXe is basically the same idea and was used to port a ton of games from Flash to all sorts of platforms and Monkey was another similar attempt (i think most people aren't aware of these two because they were gaming related and really limited to indie games).

Re: Zed DeltaDB

#163

Post by rufasterisco »

NoDodgeQuestion wrote: post #6

Zed should focus on basics. When it focuses on basics Zed is good. https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/54150 failing to show newly created files and declining to provide a refresh button, instead adding a polling backend, breaks Zed on WSL. Why a new version control system? Why not git, jj, or another existing system?

Because the way we code has completely changed, and there is plenty of room for innovation.

I am convinced that the conversation is the primary artifact produce while coding, which is not a common/popular opinion. Still, i love to see someone pushing forward on this.

Re: Zed DeltaDB

#164

Post by teaearlgraycold »

cute_boi wrote: post #11
teaearlgraycold wrote: post #7

This is a big unsolved dev tooling problem. Glad someone competent is working on it.

Yes, but it saps away the time that could be used to improve zed.

Well this is going to be integrated into Zed. It’s an improvement by definition.

Re: Zed DeltaDB

#165

Post by neya »

dlisboa wrote: post #87
NoDodgeQuestion wrote: post #6

Zed should focus on basics. When it focuses on basics Zed is good. https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/54150 failing to show newly created files and declining to provide a refresh button, instead adding a polling backend, breaks Zed on WSL. Why a new version control system? Why not git, jj, or another existing system?

There should be a concept called "engineering privilege". I see some companies do things that are widely out of their core product and engineers there just having fun with a bunch of different stuff with seemingly no commitment to bring in revenue. They'll re-invent/re-write things constantly, write a new compiler/package manager for their chosen language, create new frameworks, new open source projects unrelated to…

> They'll re-invent/re-write things constantly

Re-invent is fine, that's how we actually get the good stuff we use.

Re-write (frequently) is usually a sign of bad power dynamics in the team, code rot and generally bad engineering management, in my experience.

That's why most React shops end up in this vicious cycle of constant re-writes of a perfectly fine working system for this reason. Yeah, must be really nice getting paid for it too.

Re: Zed DeltaDB

#166

Post by nxc18 »

senderista wrote: post #143
nxc18 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah apparently Zed was engineered for speed but I find it very slow in general, especially on startup. VS Code can slow down as you add functionality, but Zed often just doesn’t have that functionality at all. So the proper comparison is “VS Code minus all extension-provided features” which is actually pretty fast.

Too bad VCs won't give you money for just building a fast editor.

Agree. Too bad it is impossible to have a sustainable, responsible business. Everything has to be to the moon, not to a sustainable future.

Re: Zed DeltaDB

#168

Post by hi5ato »

VSCode is great, but its lack of a sandbox for extensions makes it extremely vulnerable to supply chain attacks. Zed is one of the few major editors that isolates plugins, which is why I like it. However, it has far too many bugs.

Regarding DeltaDB’s request to 'log conversations and changes together', I think the Linux kernel's development model — which combines mailing lists, patch exchanges and Git — provides a good solution.

I suspect that, to secure funding or land enterprise contracts, they need to showcase a “showcase” project like DeltaDB, but I believe they also want to focus on the core parts of the editor.

--- I wrote the original text, but I had an LLM polish it, so there are em dashes in it

Re: Zed DeltaDB

#169

Post by WD-42 »

NewsaHackO wrote: post #160
WD-42 wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is my #1 annoyance: clicking microscopic icons at the very bottom of the screen to switch views. Have you considered using a keybind? They even show which keybind to use when you hover them. Amazing that someone would prefer a vertical bar that is 85% empty, wasted space instead of pressing a few keys on the keyboard - for a text editor of all things.

Having keyboard shortcuts isn’t a valid reason for UI buttons to be unusable. If it should solely be accessed by a shortcut, then they should just remove the buttons altogether.

Except they aren’t unusable either.

Re: Zed DeltaDB

#170

Post by AlotOfReading »

nirvdrum wrote: post #86
JaggedJax wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All I can say is it's the only editor I've ever used with this type of issue and unfortunately it's a deal breaker for me. I can get by with any other editor even if they aren't my favorite, but only Zed made me realize that the most important thing an editor can do for me is accurately show me files.

Have you checked your fs.inotify.max_user_watches value? Maybe your value is too low and Zed can't watch the files that are changing. I know the JetBrains IDEs need the default to be increased on Linux because they detected it and prompted me to increase it.

Even if that's the case, max_user_watches is never less than 8k unless you've set it lower for some reason. If the editor is prioritizing currently open files as it should, there should basically never be a problem even if project sync suffers.
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