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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

#61

Post by Jtsummers »

pjmlp wrote: post #21
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

Interesting read, however as someone from the same age group as Casey Muratori, this does not make much sense. > The "immediate mode" GUI was conceived by Casey Muratori in a talk over 20 years ago. Maybe he might have made it known to people not old enough to have lived through the old days, however this is how we used to program GUIs in 8 and 16 bit home computers, and has always been a thing in game consoles.

It's like the common claim that data-oriented programming came out of game development. It's ahistorical, but a common belief. People can't see past their heroes (Casey Muratori, Jonathon Blow) or the past decade or two of work.

Re: Zed editor switching graphics lib from blade to wgpu

#62

Post by airstrike »

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

iced is doing great

Re: Zed editor switching graphics lib from blade to wgpu

#63

Post by vodou »

piker wrote: post #25
pjmlp wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting read, however as someone from the same age group as Casey Muratori, this does not make much sense. > The "immediate mode" GUI was conceived by Casey Muratori in a talk over 20 years ago. Maybe he might have made it known to people not old enough to have lived through the old days, however this is how we used to program GUIs in 8 and 16 bit home computers, and has always been a thing in game consoles.

I mean, fair enough, but [at least] wikipedia agrees with that take. > Graphical user interfaces traditionally use retained mode-style API design,[2][5] but immediate mode GUIs instead use an immediate mode-style API design, in which user code directly specifies the GUI elements to draw in the user input loop. For example, rather than having a CreateButton() function that a user would call once to instantiate a butto…

I am pretty sure there are people here qualified enough to edit that Wikipedia page in a proper way.

Re: Zed editor switching graphics lib from blade to wgpu

#64

Post by WD-42 »

IshKebab wrote: post #45
paddy_m wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd love to read a writeup of the state of Rust GUI and the ecosystem if you could point me at one.

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’m currently writing an application that uses virtual lists in GTK: GtkListView, GtkGridView, there may be others. You ruled out GTK because of its looks I guess, I’m targeting Linux so the looks are perfect.

Re: Zed editor switching graphics lib from blade to wgpu

#65

Post by kelvinjps10 »

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

I don't feel like having one main library for creating windows it's bad, I feel like that way the work gets shared and more collaboration happens

Re: Zed editor switching graphics lib from blade to wgpu

#66

Post by nu11ptr »

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…

While unfortunate, to me this just says any user requested features aren't going to get merged anytime soon. As is, it already runs on windows/linux/mac, and will need to do so maturely for Zed to function. Therefore, to me, this isn't that big of a deal, and when they need things like web support (on their roadmap), they will then add that.

I'm curious... does anyone have any PRs or features that they feel need merging in order to use GPUI in their own projects? (other than web support)

Re: Zed editor switching graphics lib from blade to wgpu

#67

Post by nu11ptr »

WD-42 wrote: post #64
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’m currently writing an application that uses virtual lists in GTK: GtkListView, GtkGridView, there may be others. You ruled out GTK because of its looks I guess, I’m targeting Linux so the looks are perfect.

Yeah, I need cross platform, and GTK looks quite foreign on Windows/macOS IMO. I toyed with custom themes, but couldn't find any I liked for a cross platform look (wanted something closer to Fluent UI).

Re: Zed editor switching graphics lib from blade to wgpu

#68

Post by badhorseman »

chiffaa wrote: post #59
badhorseman wrote: post #50

The 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.

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

My tone probably came off as antagonistic and that was not my intention. I was interested in if anyone was using the high fidelity graphical features for something other then making the environment prettier.

I am always interested in what features new editors and how people use them and such and if I am missing out.

Re: Zed editor switching graphics lib from blade to wgpu

#69

Post by eklavya »

badhorseman wrote: post #50

The 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.

I wanted to check the hype, so I installed Zed and opened a go project.

Ram usage:

VS Code 580 MB

Zed 410 MB

I don't see a reason yet to switch away from VS Code, more feature complete and I don't care about scroll speed, it's good enough in vs code.

Re: Zed editor switching graphics lib from blade to wgpu

#70

Post by PKop »

pjmlp wrote: post #21
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

Interesting read, however as someone from the same age group as Casey Muratori, this does not make much sense. > The "immediate mode" GUI was conceived by Casey Muratori in a talk over 20 years ago. Maybe he might have made it known to people not old enough to have lived through the old days, however this is how we used to program GUIs in 8 and 16 bit home computers, and has always been a thing in game consoles.

> Maybe he might have made it known to people

Yes, he coined the term rather than invent the technique

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