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I am curious why they chose to build their own rendering engine. They could have first written a terminal application with the same (at least functionally) col

by norir 3y ago

I am curious why they chose to build their own rendering engine. They could have first written a terminal application with the same (at least functionally) collaboration features and gotten a cross platform solution almost for free. From a latency perspective, it's hard to imagine that they can do substantially better than, say, kitty + neovim. Hats off to them for pulling off a poc, but I do think the rendering engine is a liability for them that will potentially taketh as much as it giveth. In other words, is it worth investing a significant portion of their $10MM investment on rendering when it is still quite uncertain what the market for editor based collab tools looks like?

habitue 3y ago
Think of a terminal app like html: a cross platform UI markup language but with massive limitations. (The markup is terminal escape codes and various extensions). If you want speed, memory efficiency, and a good UI[0] you have to go with a native toolkit. Luckily, with rust and wgpu[1], there is actually a reasonable route to native performance in a cross platform way. The way they've chosen to go isn't actually that unreasonable[2] [0] to state the obvious: terminals are not good UI. I have a fondness for a cool tui, but it's clear they're more limited than native graphical UIs. [1] https://wgpu.rs/ https://wgpu.rs/ [2] https://zed.dev/blog/videogame https://zed.dev/blog/videogame