Zed seems to be already suffering from heavy technical debt. From my perspective, as a game dev, their stack is a lot heavier than it should be.
That happens when you don't talk to enough users, build the wrong things, and then iterate like a good startup. It compounds Building a chat platform in an IDE with CRDTs...? That screams we are more interested in the solutions than the problems, and that they didn't appreciate network effect before attempting this
Zed editor switching graphics lib from blade to wgpu
211–220 of 321 posts
Re: Zed editor switching graphics lib from blade to wgpu
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
A lot of people use VSCode. Zed's value proposition is being basically that but with fully native code, so without the madness that is Electron. If you're not a fan of this kind of tooling, it's totally fine, but many people see the value in having an extensible graphical code editor
Is Zed really fully native? Last time I tried it (few months back) it felt really slow. Truns out it was spawning nodejs servers and using tons of memory. Honestly, vscode was much faster for me (and looked much better).
The only reason it would be spawning Node.js processes is if it's running a javaScript/typescript language server for you, but that's not a property of Zed itself, it's something any other editor would do (including VS Code). Also, the resident memory of Zed, even with multiple entire projects with hundreds of tabs open, running several language servers and multiple terminals and AI agents for me never exceeds about 900 megabytes, which is significantly less than VS Code uses even at startup.
Whatever it was that you ran into, it's likely some kind of fluke or platform-specific bug.
Re: Zed editor switching graphics lib from blade to wgpu
#213An 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
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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
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.
In fact the entire Qt group is just work 650m EUR
Re: Zed editor switching graphics lib from blade to wgpu
#215Zed 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
Re: Zed editor switching graphics lib from blade to wgpu
#216Switched from Intellij (various) to Cursor because of AI integration, only using Claude Code CLI, switched to VS because Cursor became so annoying every release, pushing their agents down my throat, activating what I did deactivate every release, recently thought "Why do I even use that slow bloated thing of VS?" and switched to Zed. Very happy camper. So much faster. So much snappier. Would love Claude Code CLI inte…
Yep. Zed is the best. It’s in an optimum spot for me. It’s super snappy and has good implementation of vim keybindings for manual coding, and it has appropriate AI integration that does all the AI stuff I want without being in my face about how AI it all is.
Re: Zed editor switching graphics lib from blade to wgpu
#217The Zed editor seems kind of silly to me. I would rather my editor works in many possible environments maybe even one that only has a tty interface. What advantages are people finding with this editor other then high fidelity scrolling.
The advantage I find personally, at least compared to something like emacs, is not just that you get high fidelity scrolling, but that the editor can open 60,000 line code files instantaneously syntax highlight all of it using trees that are and be butter smooth and responsive the entire time I'm searching through making multi-cursor edits or moving through the file. As well as being able to open for instance log files that are multi-megabytes large without having to worry about anything.
Plus, Zed has a lot of refinements and features over other editors, even if you discount the benefits of GPUI. I've spoken at length before about why I think its approach to coding agents is the best at sort of enhancing the human in the loop and keeping you in a flow state and preventing skill degradation[0], but I also think the range and design of the editing actions are better than almost all modern text editors, closer to what something like Emacs provides, and the UI is overall more streamlined and pleasant to use than something like VS Code, even though it's generally the same philosophy. There's also the collaboration features and the edit predictions.
Re: Zed editor switching graphics lib from blade to wgpu
#218Earlier 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.
IMGUI and other GPU accelerated toolkits exist and have been created without billons of VC revenue. In fact the entire Qt group is just work 650m EUR
Re: Zed editor switching graphics lib from blade to wgpu
#219Earlier 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
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 comm…
Re: Zed editor switching graphics lib from blade to wgpu
#220I find it odd the rust community feels the need to reimplement tried and tested APIs in "pure safe Rust". Like no other language has better C integration, and we have had cross-platform windowing libraries since like the 90's, why does everyone reach for a brand new unstable libraries with less maintainer support? Edit: replying to https://tritium.legal/blog/desktop , not the OP
Also, we don't have good cross platform desktop GUI libraries in C. That's why everyone started using Electron.
(*) with some small exceptions