Developer Voices Building the Zed Text Editor (with Nathan Sobo)
Jun 5, 2024
Nathan Sobo talks about building Zed, a text editor in Rust, focusing on UI design, performance optimization, and collaboration features. He discusses challenges in editor development, using Rust for Zed, high frame rate rendering, WebAssembly, and testing concurrent networking code. The podcast explores innovative features like TreeSitter, Language Server Protocol, and future visions for Zed, including open-sourcing components and CRDB integration.
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Zed's UI Framework
- Zed's UI framework prioritizes performance and aesthetics.
- It uses a transient DOM, rebuilt each frame, unlike virtual DOMs, for speed.
Tree-Based Architecture
- Zed transforms text files into annotated trees for editing, then into another tree for rendering.
- This tree-based architecture manages complex editing features effectively.
Extensibility with WebAssembly
- Zed's extensibility will use WebAssembly components, offering flexibility and potential integration with various languages like Rust and Rock.
- A key consideration is the design of the API for these Wasm components.