7 ms·

This is why you don’t make your own cross platform toolkit.

by mxhwll 1y ago

andsoitis 1y ago
while I would agree in general, there could theoretically be SOME applications where the range of UI controls (and systems) is small enough where it could pay off. But things tend to expand in surface area... So with that, this presents a HUGE opportunity for someone to build something akin to Zed, but not with the baggage that their technical strategy brings.
- cosmic_cheese 1y ago
  > So with that, this presents a HUGE opportunity for someone to build something akin to Zed, but not with the baggage that their technical strategy brings. Not sure it’s so clean-cut. More than avoiding baggage, you’re just shifting it elsewhere. The question is if you want to own (and can handle) the baggage and benefit from the control that brings.
WD-42 1y ago
You'd rather see another crappy, slow editor packaging an entire browser? Because that seems like what people are using for "cross platform toolkits" these days. I'm glad Zed is being ambitious, it's truly a joy to use because it feels native. And to be honest, it's Windows, who cares. If you are a developer you should have switched to Linux years ago anyway.
- steve_adams_86 1y ago
  No, there are good reasons developers are on Windows. Industrial and embedded systems are very often Windows-based, for better or worse. Heaps of games are developed on Windows. Windows-based software itself is developed on Windows.
  - com2kid 1y ago
    Being ~2 weeks into migrating from Windows to Linux for my dev machine, there are a lot of good reasons why people use Windows, and I keep learning more each and every day! From a lock screen that appears ~3 seconds after my desktop does (during which time I can interact with my desktop...) to getting Nvidia GPU passthrough working in Docker being harder running on Linux natively than what it was making it work on WLS (...) to absurd amount of time it takes my machine to come out of sleep. Oh also the popping and clicking over my BT headset every time someone speaks in a meeting. That was wonderful. Despite using an older model MB, I needed to install some kernel extensions to get system temperatures working. Also if I want to develop desktop software, I'm going to be writing against Windows anyway because at least that is somewhat documented, vs the ever changing landscape of Linux desktop software development. (Windows used to be the OS for desktop software, but Microsoft shot themselves in that foot, then removed the entire leg, long ago, by constantly changing and deprecating frameworks, ugh, 20+ years of API stability down the drain...)
    - saghm 1y ago
      > to Nvidia GPU passthrough working in Docker being harder running on Linux natively than what it was making it work on WLS To be fair, assuming you're using WSL2, you're running docker on a VM, so it doesn't sound that crazy that it might be more work without the abstraction around the hardware that defines. If there were a built-in VM for your Linux distro, it might end up being easier to expose the GPU through that to things running on it than directly too. I can't say I've ever had any need to access a GPU from a container running on a VM then, so this is just conjecture.
  - inetknght 1y ago
    > Industrial and embedded systems are very often Windows-based I find Windows to be the outlier against a sea of embedded Linux devices. > Heaps of games are developed on Windows Inertia. > Windows-based software itself is developed on Windows. Plenty of Windows-based software is developed on Linux with Wine.
    - steve_adams_86 1y ago
      > I find Windows to be the outlier against a sea of embedded Linux devices. I think you're thinking of consumer devices, not industrial. > Inertia. I think that's a tough case to make. Windows offers legitimate technical advantages for gaming and game development. Integration with large vendors' tooling like NVIDIA and AMD is pretty huge. There are real workflow benefits. > Windows-based software itself is developed on Windows. You know more about this than I do. That sounds kind of wild to me, like it could be a pretty awful work flow at times for no good reason. It looks like you don't have access to native debugging tools and Wine itself introduces potential compatibility risks. I would rather just develop on target, personally
      - rstuart4133 1y ago
        > I think you're thinking of consumer devices, not industrial. Maybe he's thinking of more modern devices. There was a time when Microsoft flogged WinCE as an embedded solution, and yes a lot of people producing embedded stuff drank the kool aid. I watched one instance of this happen first hand. They asked me what OS should they base their shiny new product (that I would be the first customer of), I said I would use some 'nix, but they should chose what they were comfortable with. It turned out to be bad advice. They were comfortable with Windows desktop of course, so they chose WinCE. WinCE is not the stable WinNT they were familiar with, despite what Microsoft's marketing said. I've used a number of WinCE based devices in the past, they were all about as reliable as Windows 95/ME, which is to say most wouldn't last the day without rebooting. In the end they could only get it working by shipping the product to a team in Germany that had access to the WinCE source. It cost them a small fortune, and lost them over a year. The delay lost me as a customer. Most (I hope all, but it's never all) of todays experienced software engineers wouldn't make that mistake, but these people where (pretty good) hardware engineers, with a vision for a product they built the hardware for. Developing software was something you hired people to so for you, like plumbing and legal work. And they wanted those people to provide them with a familiar environment. WinCE has long since been retired, or course. May it soul burn in hell. Yes, those same hardware engineers who insist on sticking to what they are familiar with might turn to Windows 11 instead. But that comes with costs - no ARM or other CPU's, huge resource requirements, insistence on TPM's, so little lack of control of the platform that you lose control of the USS Yorktown [0]. Those costs are large. In fact so large they would have overwhelmed the budget of my engineering friends years ago, and they would have just gone with Linux. I haven't seen a new embedded Windows design in quite a while, so I suspect that's true for most embedded projects now. [0] https://archive.is/aKrml https://archive.is/aKrml
  - cholantesh 1y ago
    As someone who's ambivalent about the experience, I'd say "because that's what my employer issued to me" is perfectly acceptable.
    - steve_adams_86 1y ago
      It's also probably one of the most common explanations for why anyone's using it. It's 70% of the market, and even more if you focus on enterprise. Us Linux and Mac folks are weirdos.
  - psyclobe 1y ago
    Was a windows dev for 20 years-but then I got a job where I didn’t have to use that ad infested joke of an operating system. Never going back.
- pjmlp 1y ago
  I use computers since 1986, UNIX variants since 1992, and yet Windows is where I spend most of my time. I find hilarious this FOSS concept that developers only use Linux, I wonder who writes software for all other operating systems in the world.
- perching_aix 1y ago
  > If you are a developer you should have switched to Linux years ago anyway. This is so often repeated, but I genuinely don't understand why. Could you try selling me on it? I ended up going the sysadmin/devops route instead after college, but the more I learn about Linux, the less I understand why anyone would choose it for personal, active manual use. I can understand server deployments, it works well enough. It's available at no cost, Windows Server is way out in the far other end in terms of current desired behavior, and whatever pains it has you get paid to make up for. None of which applies on a personal device level. The most common selling points I see are more performance and less "spying". I find neither of these very persuasive, and I'm not interested in ideological rationales either (supporting free software). If you have anything else, I'm all ears.
  - skydhash 1y ago
    Not selling you on it, as I find that, if you're using IDEs, OSes don't really matter. And windows can be actually beneficial as you'll get prime support from most vendors. Where Unix shine is adhoc automation. Almost everything is fully hackable and that makes some solution easier to implement. As in case for the desktop, you can switch out your audio stack, alter the display of any element and many other things. Using windows is borrowing some shoes while Linux can be your favorite slipper.
    - perching_aix 1y ago
      Do you have any easy automations in mind that would be broadly appealing and one really needs to go out of their way to implement on Windows / is impossible to do so? I have a few things here and there, but it's more a scheduled script or two than anything more elaborate, and I don't think they were difficult to make and deploy. > you can switch out your audio stack Why would I want that? Isn't this more for someone doing live audio production (e.g. due to latency concerns)? In general, the customizability angle is also another that doesn't resonate with me much. It's less that I want to customize my stuff, and more that I want my stuff to be to my liking from the get-go.
      - 1y ago
- vovavili 1y ago
  >If you are a developer you should have switched to Linux years ago anyway. These days, WSL2 effectively eliminates a need for that for most developers.
  - pjmlp 1y ago
    And cheaper than VM Workstation, or easier than Virtual Vox, my solutions since 2010, I never dual booted again in 15 years.
  - LtWorf 1y ago
    If you write a very narrow category of high level server software or command line utilities. Otherwise no.
- wolvesechoes 1y ago
  > You'd rather see another crappy, slow editor packaging an entire browser? Windows still offers other options, even if MS itself tend to ignore them. > If you are a developer you should have switched to Linux years ago anyway. Developers is much broader set than web developers, and even then advantages of Linux escape me.
- jamwil 1y ago
  Some people work for large corporations and can’t just use whatever computer they want.
Mountain_Skies 1y ago
The FOSS community has become full of ideological landmines, with projects now including clauses in their requirements, often vague and ill defined, about how those who build upon their projects must act and believe. As a result, some are now finding it less risky to roll their own base dependencies instead of using someone else's project that could at any time become problematic for non-technical reasons. While I doubt this had anything to do with the decision by the Zed team to make their own toolkit, it is something becoming more common. Hopefully it doesn't start happening in the encryption space.
- wwfn 1y ago
  I can see "ill defined" causing problems. But isn't an explicit code of conduct more defined than none? (Assuming I'm reading that correctly from your comment.) There aren't too many epithets floating around that offend me specifically. And I haven't heard anyone say I shouldn't/don't exist. So it's hard for me personally to feel the need for CoC and the like. But I'm all for policy that protects everyone against that kind of abuse -- which seems to be on the rise. Are there better alternatives?
pjmlp 1y ago
Or why you don't insist in using Khronos stuff on Windows, when most OEMs only care about the native API, DirectX. Lets recap that this lesson has been learned by Godot developers, regarding their backends as well. The ICD mechanism is a kind of escape hatch leftover due to backwards compatibility, and even user mode drivers build on top of DirectX runtime infrastructure.
- leecommamichael 1y ago
  Is it Khronos? The 3 issues they linked were: 1. ARM support missing for one of their Cargo crates. 2. An issue with RemoteDesktop 3. The team required dynamic_rendering, and it wasn't available for user with an old machine on Windows 10. It really depends how you define scope, but I don't think I would've taken on another GPU backend for that.
  - pjmlp 1y ago
    In the sense that OpenGL and Vulkan are paper standards that OEMs might implement, whereas they tend to design their DirectX drivers alongside Microsoft, and then their OpenGL/Vulkan drivers are mostly an afterthought. This is especially visible when buying random asian cards that aren't the reference designs from AMD and NVidia. Intel was never great regardless of the API. Additionally we have the usual extension spaghetti, which is one thing that has beaten them here. Require too many of them, and coding around their inexistence becomes like using yet another API, that is similar but not quite.
kermatt 1y ago
What should they have used instead?
- delta_p_delta_x 1y ago
  As mentioned here... Probably Skia, which would've saved them the effort of writing any GPU backend, let alone three.
  - karunamurti 1y ago
    Isn't Skia controlled by Google?
    - kermatt 1y ago
      https://github.com/google/skia https://github.com/google/skia

This is why you don’t make your own cross platform toolkit.

by mxhwll 1y ago

This is why you don’t make your own cross platform toolkit.

while I would agree in general, there could theoretically be SOME applications where the range of UI controls (and systems) is small enough where it could pay off. But things tend to expand in surface area... So with that, this presents a HUGE opportunity for someone to build something akin to Zed, but not with the baggage that their technical strategy brings.

cosmic_cheese 1y ago
> So with that, this presents a HUGE opportunity for someone to build something akin to Zed, but not with the baggage that their technical strategy brings. Not sure it’s so clean-cut. More than avoiding baggage, you’re just shifting it elsewhere. The question is if you want to own (and can handle) the baggage and benefit from the control that brings.

WD-42 1y ago

You'd rather see another crappy, slow editor packaging an entire browser? Because that seems like what people are using for "cross platform toolkits" these days. I'm glad Zed is being ambitious, it's truly a joy to use because it feels native. And to be honest, it's Windows, who cares. If you are a developer you should have switched to Linux years ago anyway.

steve_adams_86 1y ago
No, there are good reasons developers are on Windows. Industrial and embedded systems are very often Windows-based, for better or worse. Heaps of games are developed on Windows. Windows-based software itself is developed on Windows.
- com2kid 1y ago
  Being ~2 weeks into migrating from Windows to Linux for my dev machine, there are a lot of good reasons why people use Windows, and I keep learning more each and every day! From a lock screen that appears ~3 seconds after my desktop does (during which time I can interact with my desktop...) to getting Nvidia GPU passthrough working in Docker being harder running on Linux natively than what it was making it work on WLS (...) to absurd amount of time it takes my machine to come out of sleep. Oh also the popping and clicking over my BT headset every time someone speaks in a meeting. That was wonderful. Despite using an older model MB, I needed to install some kernel extensions to get system temperatures working. Also if I want to develop desktop software, I'm going to be writing against Windows anyway because at least that is somewhat documented, vs the ever changing landscape of Linux desktop software development. (Windows used to be the OS for desktop software, but Microsoft shot themselves in that foot, then removed the entire leg, long ago, by constantly changing and deprecating frameworks, ugh, 20+ years of API stability down the drain...)
  - saghm 1y ago
    > to Nvidia GPU passthrough working in Docker being harder running on Linux natively than what it was making it work on WLS To be fair, assuming you're using WSL2, you're running docker on a VM, so it doesn't sound that crazy that it might be more work without the abstraction around the hardware that defines. If there were a built-in VM for your Linux distro, it might end up being easier to expose the GPU through that to things running on it than directly too. I can't say I've ever had any need to access a GPU from a container running on a VM then, so this is just conjecture.
- inetknght 1y ago
  > Industrial and embedded systems are very often Windows-based I find Windows to be the outlier against a sea of embedded Linux devices. > Heaps of games are developed on Windows Inertia. > Windows-based software itself is developed on Windows. Plenty of Windows-based software is developed on Linux with Wine.
  - steve_adams_86 1y ago
    > I find Windows to be the outlier against a sea of embedded Linux devices. I think you're thinking of consumer devices, not industrial. > Inertia. I think that's a tough case to make. Windows offers legitimate technical advantages for gaming and game development. Integration with large vendors' tooling like NVIDIA and AMD is pretty huge. There are real workflow benefits. > Windows-based software itself is developed on Windows. You know more about this than I do. That sounds kind of wild to me, like it could be a pretty awful work flow at times for no good reason. It looks like you don't have access to native debugging tools and Wine itself introduces potential compatibility risks. I would rather just develop on target, personally
    - rstuart4133 1y ago
      > I think you're thinking of consumer devices, not industrial. Maybe he's thinking of more modern devices. There was a time when Microsoft flogged WinCE as an embedded solution, and yes a lot of people producing embedded stuff drank the kool aid. I watched one instance of this happen first hand. They asked me what OS should they base their shiny new product (that I would be the first customer of), I said I would use some 'nix, but they should chose what they were comfortable with. It turned out to be bad advice. They were comfortable with Windows desktop of course, so they chose WinCE. WinCE is not the stable WinNT they were familiar with, despite what Microsoft's marketing said. I've used a number of WinCE based devices in the past, they were all about as reliable as Windows 95/ME, which is to say most wouldn't last the day without rebooting. In the end they could only get it working by shipping the product to a team in Germany that had access to the WinCE source. It cost them a small fortune, and lost them over a year. The delay lost me as a customer. Most (I hope all, but it's never all) of todays experienced software engineers wouldn't make that mistake, but these people where (pretty good) hardware engineers, with a vision for a product they built the hardware for. Developing software was something you hired people to so for you, like plumbing and legal work. And they wanted those people to provide them with a familiar environment. WinCE has long since been retired, or course. May it soul burn in hell. Yes, those same hardware engineers who insist on sticking to what they are familiar with might turn to Windows 11 instead. But that comes with costs - no ARM or other CPU's, huge resource requirements, insistence on TPM's, so little lack of control of the platform that you lose control of the USS Yorktown [0]. Those costs are large. In fact so large they would have overwhelmed the budget of my engineering friends years ago, and they would have just gone with Linux. I haven't seen a new embedded Windows design in quite a while, so I suspect that's true for most embedded projects now. [0] https://archive.is/aKrml https://archive.is/aKrml
- cholantesh 1y ago
  As someone who's ambivalent about the experience, I'd say "because that's what my employer issued to me" is perfectly acceptable.
  - steve_adams_86 1y ago
    It's also probably one of the most common explanations for why anyone's using it. It's 70% of the market, and even more if you focus on enterprise. Us Linux and Mac folks are weirdos.
- psyclobe 1y ago
  Was a windows dev for 20 years-but then I got a job where I didn’t have to use that ad infested joke of an operating system. Never going back.
pjmlp 1y ago
I use computers since 1986, UNIX variants since 1992, and yet Windows is where I spend most of my time. I find hilarious this FOSS concept that developers only use Linux, I wonder who writes software for all other operating systems in the world.
perching_aix 1y ago
> If you are a developer you should have switched to Linux years ago anyway. This is so often repeated, but I genuinely don't understand why. Could you try selling me on it? I ended up going the sysadmin/devops route instead after college, but the more I learn about Linux, the less I understand why anyone would choose it for personal, active manual use. I can understand server deployments, it works well enough. It's available at no cost, Windows Server is way out in the far other end in terms of current desired behavior, and whatever pains it has you get paid to make up for. None of which applies on a personal device level. The most common selling points I see are more performance and less "spying". I find neither of these very persuasive, and I'm not interested in ideological rationales either (supporting free software). If you have anything else, I'm all ears.
- skydhash 1y ago
  Not selling you on it, as I find that, if you're using IDEs, OSes don't really matter. And windows can be actually beneficial as you'll get prime support from most vendors. Where Unix shine is adhoc automation. Almost everything is fully hackable and that makes some solution easier to implement. As in case for the desktop, you can switch out your audio stack, alter the display of any element and many other things. Using windows is borrowing some shoes while Linux can be your favorite slipper.
  - perching_aix 1y ago
    Do you have any easy automations in mind that would be broadly appealing and one really needs to go out of their way to implement on Windows / is impossible to do so? I have a few things here and there, but it's more a scheduled script or two than anything more elaborate, and I don't think they were difficult to make and deploy. > you can switch out your audio stack Why would I want that? Isn't this more for someone doing live audio production (e.g. due to latency concerns)? In general, the customizability angle is also another that doesn't resonate with me much. It's less that I want to customize my stuff, and more that I want my stuff to be to my liking from the get-go.
    - 1y ago
vovavili 1y ago
>If you are a developer you should have switched to Linux years ago anyway. These days, WSL2 effectively eliminates a need for that for most developers.
- pjmlp 1y ago
  And cheaper than VM Workstation, or easier than Virtual Vox, my solutions since 2010, I never dual booted again in 15 years.
- LtWorf 1y ago
  If you write a very narrow category of high level server software or command line utilities. Otherwise no.
wolvesechoes 1y ago
> You'd rather see another crappy, slow editor packaging an entire browser? Windows still offers other options, even if MS itself tend to ignore them. > If you are a developer you should have switched to Linux years ago anyway. Developers is much broader set than web developers, and even then advantages of Linux escape me.
jamwil 1y ago
Some people work for large corporations and can’t just use whatever computer they want.

Mountain_Skies 1y ago

The FOSS community has become full of ideological landmines, with projects now including clauses in their requirements, often vague and ill defined, about how those who build upon their projects must act and believe. As a result, some are now finding it less risky to roll their own base dependencies instead of using someone else's project that could at any time become problematic for non-technical reasons. While I doubt this had anything to do with the decision by the Zed team to make their own toolkit, it is something becoming more common. Hopefully it doesn't start happening in the encryption space.

wwfn 1y ago
I can see "ill defined" causing problems. But isn't an explicit code of conduct more defined than none? (Assuming I'm reading that correctly from your comment.) There aren't too many epithets floating around that offend me specifically. And I haven't heard anyone say I shouldn't/don't exist. So it's hard for me personally to feel the need for CoC and the like. But I'm all for policy that protects everyone against that kind of abuse -- which seems to be on the rise. Are there better alternatives?

pjmlp 1y ago

Or why you don't insist in using Khronos stuff on Windows, when most OEMs only care about the native API, DirectX. Lets recap that this lesson has been learned by Godot developers, regarding their backends as well. The ICD mechanism is a kind of escape hatch leftover due to backwards compatibility, and even user mode drivers build on top of DirectX runtime infrastructure.

leecommamichael 1y ago
Is it Khronos? The 3 issues they linked were: 1. ARM support missing for one of their Cargo crates. 2. An issue with RemoteDesktop 3. The team required dynamic_rendering, and it wasn't available for user with an old machine on Windows 10. It really depends how you define scope, but I don't think I would've taken on another GPU backend for that.
- pjmlp 1y ago
  In the sense that OpenGL and Vulkan are paper standards that OEMs might implement, whereas they tend to design their DirectX drivers alongside Microsoft, and then their OpenGL/Vulkan drivers are mostly an afterthought. This is especially visible when buying random asian cards that aren't the reference designs from AMD and NVidia. Intel was never great regardless of the API. Additionally we have the usual extension spaghetti, which is one thing that has beaten them here. Require too many of them, and coding around their inexistence becomes like using yet another API, that is similar but not quite.

kermatt 1y ago

What should they have used instead?

delta_p_delta_x 1y ago
As mentioned here... Probably Skia, which would've saved them the effort of writing any GPU backend, let alone three.
- karunamurti 1y ago
  Isn't Skia controlled by Google?
  - kermatt 1y ago
    https://github.com/google/skia https://github.com/google/skia