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It looks interesting but, given how Atom was abruptly taken out the back and put out of its misery, are many devs are going to invest the time in going all in on Zed?

EDIT: Just had a look inside the app bundle to see if they were using Electron again. Looks like this is built round WebRTC instead.

EDIT2: Actually the actual 'zed' binary is just under 284MB, so maybe Zed's not built round the WebRTC framework, but just uses it for networky stuff ???

The binary is pretty big by itself.



> WebRTC

Right now, this is just used for the screen-sharing feature.

> The binary is pretty big by itself

It is. One major reasons is that we're shipping a "fat binary" (x86_64 and arm64 build in a single file). We did this to simplify the download process for users, but now that the app is getting bigger, we should probably start shipping two separate DMGs, to reduce the download time. That would cut the binary size in half.


Atom's death was not so abrupt. It had a slow, lingering demise.


> Actually the actual 'zed' binary is just under 284MB

MicroEmacs for DOS was 50K.


    du -hs /Applications/Sublime\ Text.app 

    42M /Applications/Sublime Text.app
To compare it to a peer that's cross-platform and GUI.

This is about 6x as large, just for the main binary. Which pretty much always means it'll also eat a ton more memory, and probably burn lots of processor cycles while idle for no reason at all, given the way this usually works.

[EDIT] Maybe they're including debug symbols or something? Since it seems to be in beta.


is it an electron app? like vs code?


No. It's written in Rust, with a custom UI framework. More details in this blog post: https://zed.dev/blog/videogame


Yep. Looks like you're right

  >strings /Volumes/Zed/Zed.app/Contents/MacOS/zed  | grep rust
returns a load of references to 'rustc' and 'cargo'


That's max! One of the Zed Industries cofounders :D


Ok thanks max finally a non Electron editor I can download and try without panicking about the fans spinning non stop..

Is it possible to install using nix or brew? In mac


It does not seem like. They mention they have a custom GPU accelerated UI.


You got in before I edited my comment ^^




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