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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

#191

Post by iamnbutler »

iamnbutler wrote: post #187
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…

I started the gpui-ce fork but I'm becoming somewhat more interested in a fresh framework that is more aligned with the rust ecosystem in general - using crates like glam/glamour, parley, palette, etc Lots of gpui was built with build Zed/a text editor in mind directly, and as folks have mentioned here, it is hard for Zed Industries to justify work on gpui that is purely for the community. Nathan is usually pretty pr…

I would be curious to hear about where folks are finding gaps in the rust ui ecosystem though...

I've written quite a lot of rust UI code for Zed over the past few years so I'm mostly familiar with the pros and cons of gpui, but I haven't spent much time with Iced, Dioxus, Xilem, etc.

Re: Zed editor switching graphics lib from blade to wgpu

#192

Post by tensor »

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

Iced seems really promising, however, it's a passion project by a single developer. They very clearly stated that their goal is to follow their passions and desires first, everyone else second, and that it will always be a single person project. Their readme even discourages contributions.

Companies using it in production are often forking it as a result, and trying to keep their fork in sync. Ultimately, if the community wants iced to become a major and stable framework, it will have to be forked and a community development model built around it.

And I'm not saying this to disparage the author in any way, their readme even seems to suggest that that's exactly what they'd prefer.

Re: Zed editor switching graphics lib from blade to wgpu

#193

Post by [deleted] »

TiredOfLife wrote: post #153
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

[deleted]

Re: Zed editor switching graphics lib from blade to wgpu

#194

Post by ziml77 »

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.

A text editor that can't render clear text is wild...

Re: Zed editor switching graphics lib from blade to wgpu

#195

Post by pjmlp »

SigmundA wrote: post #170
JimDabell wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is the source of the confusion: > To describe it, I coined the term “Single-path Immediate Mode Graphical User Interface,” borrowing the “immediate mode” term from graphics programming to illustrate the difference in API design from traditional GUI toolkits. — https://caseymuratori.com/blog_0001 Obviously it’s ludicrous to attribute “immediate mode” to him. As you say, it’s literally decades older than t…

Is Win16 / Win32 GDI which goes back to 1985 an immediate mode GUI? Win32 GUI common controls are a pretty thin layer over GDI and you can always take over WM_PAINT and do whatever you like. If you make your own control you musts handle WM_PAINT which seems pretty immediate to me. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/learnwin32/y... Difference between game engine and say GDI is just the window buffer inval…

No, that is event based programming, and also the basis of retained rendering, because you already have the controls that you compose, or subclass.

Handling WM_PAINT is no different from something like OnPaint() on a base class.

This was actually one of mindset shifts when moving from MS-DOS into Windows graphics programming.

Re: Zed editor switching graphics lib from blade to wgpu

#196

Post by eviks »

osener wrote: post #161
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

> We ignore for these purposes Zed's GPUI which the Zed team has transparently, and understandably abandoned as an open source endeavour Do you have a source for this?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47003569

Re: Zed editor switching graphics lib from blade to wgpu

#197

Post by ethmarks »

ZeroCool2u wrote: post #3

An interesting side effect of moving to wgpu is that in theory with some additional work, this could allow you to run Zed in a web browser similarly to how some folks run VSCode as a remote interface to the backend running on a server.

A web port is apparently already on their roadmap: https://zed.dev/roadmap#:~:text=Zed%20on%20the%20Web

Re: Zed editor switching graphics lib from blade to wgpu

#198

Post by dxdm »

slopusila wrote: post #169
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…

what is the business case for a text editor in a code writing agent world? maybe they could pivot into the luxury boutique hand-crafted artisanal code market

Text editors are for cleaning up after the agents, of course. And for crafting beautiful metaprompt files to be used by the agentic prompt-crafter intelligences that mind the grunt agents. And also for coding.

Re: Zed editor switching graphics lib from blade to wgpu

#199

Post by vatsachak »

satvikpendem wrote: post #113
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

I'm partial to Dioxus with their native renderer coming up, it should work cross-platform on mobile, web, desktop like Flutter (except web is actually HTML and CSS, not canvas) rather than only desktop which is what most Rust GUI frameworks are targeting. https://github.com/DioxusLabs/blitz

Dioxus is the real deal. It makes it super easy to create web-apps

I went from knowing nothing about web stuff to building this tool https://chakravarthysoftware.com/work_distributor in a week

Re: Zed editor switching graphics lib from blade to wgpu

#200

Post by piker »

saghm wrote: post #124
jauntywundrkind wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aside from Rust being better (impl is such a great decoupling, fearless type safety), there is afaik nothing one tenth as useful and good as cargo & is crate ecosystem (docs rs, crates.io, and all the packages). I find it odd the broader hacker community feels the need to requestion and cross-examine every choice for using rust. Like, no other language has such great just works ergonomics, with a solid language, fant…

I think you might be misunderstanding the parent comment. It sounds to me like they're arguing in favor of wrapping C GUI library when writing a GUI app in Rust, not avoiding Rust entirely. As far as I can tell, they're arguing for writing new stuff in Rust that happens to be re-using some components that aren't in Rust. I'd argue that's entirely in the spirit of Rust; kind of the whole point is that you can put a ha…

Qt is great, but it's a commercial license.
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