4 ms·

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

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 iterating on if they're interested: https://github.com/gpui-ce/gpui-ce https://github.com/gpui-ce/gpui-ce. I'm also a maintainer on that one, and would like to try to help maintain it off of work hours. But I'm not sure how much I'll be able to commit to this https://discord.com/channels/869392257814519848/1440440628646514759/1449104973626347741 https://discord.com/channels/869392257814519848/144044062864...

nu11ptr 9mo ago
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)
- satvikpendem 9mo ago
  I recently saw a PR where the author implemented shaders but it was closed by the maintainers as the feature wasn't needed by Zed the editor.
  - nu11ptr 9mo ago
    Thanks. I probably could have answered my own question had I simply looked here: https://github.com/gpui-ce/gpui-ce/pulls https://github.com/gpui-ce/gpui-ce/pulls and here: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/pulls?q=is%3Apr+is%3Aopen+gpui https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/pulls?q=is%3Apr+is%3Ao...
    - satvikpendem 9mo ago
      Sadly it doesn't actually look like gpui-ce has any activity, the maintainer merged one pull request (literally, #1) and then stopped. They should've just added more community maintainers to the GPUI repo directly rather than having a fork.
      - nu11ptr 9mo ago
        Yeah, why fork and create confusion if you don't plan to do anything with it?
        satvikpendem 9mo ago
        The creator replied: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47005761 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47005761
atonse 9mo ago
Does this mean they’re struggling financially? Yet more disruption caused by coding agents, I’m sure. We saw it quite visibly with Tailwind, now I can see if code editors are maybe struggling too, especially something like Zed which was probably still used mostly by early adopter type People, who have early adopted TUI coding agents instead. I only use cursor and zed to browse code now.
- throwaway613746 9mo ago
  Ironic, because AI Agent integration is their business model.
  - satvikpendem 9mo ago
    Now it is, after their pivot from remote pair programming via collaborative text editing, not originally.
- stonogo 9mo ago
  I don't think it means they're struggling financially. I think it means they're not steering the ship alone any more, and are responsible to others. That's how accepting investment money generally works.
laweijfmvo 9mo ago
> We gotta focus on some business relevant work in 2026 Remember that post announcing the millions of VC capital they raised? This is the result
- satvikpendem 9mo ago
  Without such venture capital, I doubt GPUI, at least to the level of complexity it has today rather than being a toy project, would have even existed. It costs money to develop open source sustainably.
  - koito17 9mo ago
    GPUI development predates Sequoia's funding by about two years.
    - satvikpendem 9mo ago
      Companies start with founders funding themselves through savings and friends and family rounds before institutional investors are usually even interested. But make no mistake, they start it as a commercial venture, otherwise they wouldn't have taken VC in the first place, nevermind that VCs wouldn't have funded it if not for their pitch on how it could become a billion dollar company. And since Sequoia? It is primarily the Zed team working full time on it, which costs money.
  - torginus 9mo ago
    IMGUI and other GPU accelerated toolkits exist and have been created without billons of VC revenue. In fact the entire Qt group is just work 650m EUR
    - satvikpendem 9mo ago
      Who said anything about billions? I just said that it costs money to pay people to work on OSS, which is accurate as ImGui is sponsored by companies and Qt is a commercial entity with infamous licensing. VC doesn't necessarily mean billions in funding.
righthand 9mo ago
Iced.rs is probably the better UI library anyways in the long run as it’s backed by a major hardware vendor. https://iced.rs https://iced.rs
- satvikpendem 9mo ago
  I'm partial to Dioxus with their native renderer coming up, it should work cross-platform on mobile, web, desktop like Flutter (except web is actually HTML and CSS, not canvas) rather than only desktop which is what most Rust GUI frameworks are targeting. https://github.com/DioxusLabs/blitz https://github.com/DioxusLabs/blitz
  - vatsachak 9mo ago
    Dioxus is the real deal. It makes it super easy to create web-apps I went from knowing nothing about web stuff to building this tool https://chakravarthysoftware.com/work_distributor https://chakravarthysoftware.com/work_distributor in a week
- tribaal 9mo ago
  Not contesting your claim, but would you mind sharing what major hardware vendor you mean? I love iced and wrote a decent amount of code using it, but in my mind the biggest sponsor is system76 - and as awesome as they are they aren’t a major vendor yet :)
  - okanat 9mo ago
    Has System76 started designing, or more correctly outsourcing more expensive custom motherboard designs, like Lenovo and Dell or are they still selling slightly customized white-label laptops?
- nu11ptr 9mo ago
  Not sure how the UI engine itself compares, but to me it is all about the available components (as a total non-designer, although AI helps with that now). The only choice I have at the moment that would meet my needs is gpui, as gpui-component now exists.
slopusila 9mo ago
what is the business case for a text editor in a code writing agent world? maybe they could pivot into the luxury boutique hand-crafted artisanal code market
- dxdm 9mo ago
  Text editors are for cleaning up after the agents, of course. And for crafting beautiful metaprompt files to be used by the agentic prompt-crafter intelligences that mind the grunt agents. And also for coding.
norman784 9mo ago
The thing with GPUI is that the library itself is very low level and their scope is limited (by design I suppose), the ui with components is a separate crate with GPL license, while GPUI license is Apache. As far GPUI has a great foundation, the community can built the components themselves.
iamnbutler 9mo ago
I started the gpui-ce fork but I'm becoming somewhat more interested in a fresh framework that is more aligned with the rust ecosystem in general - using crates like glam/glamour, parley, palette, etc Lots of gpui was built with build Zed/a text editor in mind directly, and as folks have mentioned here, it is hard for Zed Industries to justify work on gpui that is purely for the community. Nathan is usually pretty pragmatic around not optimizing early, and gpui is generally serving Zed's needs at the moment (from what I know, I haven't worked on Zed since July) I do think ZI would generally benefit if gpui did get pulled out of Zed if there was a community that was passionate about taking it over... but that is time and effort in itself.
- iamnbutler 9mo ago
  I would be curious to hear about where folks are finding gaps in the rust ui ecosystem though... I've written quite a lot of rust UI code for Zed over the past few years so I'm mostly familiar with the pros and cons of gpui, but I haven't spent much time with Iced, Dioxus, Xilem, etc.
  - EnergyAmy 9mo ago
    Iced is promising, using it for a small side project. Fairly straightforward and easy to use, but lacking basic things from more mature libraries (unsurprisingly, since it's still early). If you want something like a QTreeView for example, you're on your own. It's cool that it supports WASM, though I'd call it alpha support for now.
- satvikpendem 9mo ago
  You might also want to look into Dioxus Native as it's doing a lot of what you're interested in too, with taffy and vello for example. The gaps I see in the Rust UI ecosystem as you asked are that I want a true cross platform solution for mobile, web, and desktop while most focus only on desktop, as I use Flutter currently for this purpose but need to pull in Rust crates through an FFI layer like flutter_rust_bridge, as well as a backend server in Rust and having to share types with the frontend through some agnostic format like GraphQL, so it'd be nice to have everything in one language. Dioxus Native does in fact bill itself as "Flutter but in Rust" which I'm looking forward to a lot. How was it like working at Zed? Any reason for leaving?

nu11ptr 9mo ago

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)

satvikpendem 9mo ago
I recently saw a PR where the author implemented shaders but it was closed by the maintainers as the feature wasn't needed by Zed the editor.
- nu11ptr 9mo ago
  Thanks. I probably could have answered my own question had I simply looked here: https://github.com/gpui-ce/gpui-ce/pulls https://github.com/gpui-ce/gpui-ce/pulls and here: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/pulls?q=is%3Apr+is%3Aopen+gpui https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/pulls?q=is%3Apr+is%3Ao...
  - satvikpendem 9mo ago
    Sadly it doesn't actually look like gpui-ce has any activity, the maintainer merged one pull request (literally, #1) and then stopped. They should've just added more community maintainers to the GPUI repo directly rather than having a fork.
    - nu11ptr 9mo ago
      Yeah, why fork and create confusion if you don't plan to do anything with it?
      - satvikpendem 9mo ago
        The creator replied: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47005761 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47005761

atonse 9mo ago

Does this mean they’re struggling financially? Yet more disruption caused by coding agents, I’m sure. We saw it quite visibly with Tailwind, now I can see if code editors are maybe struggling too, especially something like Zed which was probably still used mostly by early adopter type People, who have early adopted TUI coding agents instead. I only use cursor and zed to browse code now.

throwaway613746 9mo ago
Ironic, because AI Agent integration is their business model.
- satvikpendem 9mo ago
  Now it is, after their pivot from remote pair programming via collaborative text editing, not originally.
stonogo 9mo ago
I don't think it means they're struggling financially. I think it means they're not steering the ship alone any more, and are responsible to others. That's how accepting investment money generally works.

laweijfmvo 9mo ago

> We gotta focus on some business relevant work in 2026 Remember that post announcing the millions of VC capital they raised? This is the result

satvikpendem 9mo ago
Without such venture capital, I doubt GPUI, at least to the level of complexity it has today rather than being a toy project, would have even existed. It costs money to develop open source sustainably.
- koito17 9mo ago
  GPUI development predates Sequoia's funding by about two years.
  - satvikpendem 9mo ago
    Companies start with founders funding themselves through savings and friends and family rounds before institutional investors are usually even interested. But make no mistake, they start it as a commercial venture, otherwise they wouldn't have taken VC in the first place, nevermind that VCs wouldn't have funded it if not for their pitch on how it could become a billion dollar company. And since Sequoia? It is primarily the Zed team working full time on it, which costs money.
- torginus 9mo ago
  IMGUI and other GPU accelerated toolkits exist and have been created without billons of VC revenue. In fact the entire Qt group is just work 650m EUR
  - satvikpendem 9mo ago
    Who said anything about billions? I just said that it costs money to pay people to work on OSS, which is accurate as ImGui is sponsored by companies and Qt is a commercial entity with infamous licensing. VC doesn't necessarily mean billions in funding.

righthand 9mo ago

Iced.rs is probably the better UI library anyways in the long run as it’s backed by a major hardware vendor. https://iced.rs https://iced.rs

satvikpendem 9mo ago
I'm partial to Dioxus with their native renderer coming up, it should work cross-platform on mobile, web, desktop like Flutter (except web is actually HTML and CSS, not canvas) rather than only desktop which is what most Rust GUI frameworks are targeting. https://github.com/DioxusLabs/blitz https://github.com/DioxusLabs/blitz
- vatsachak 9mo ago
  Dioxus is the real deal. It makes it super easy to create web-apps I went from knowing nothing about web stuff to building this tool https://chakravarthysoftware.com/work_distributor https://chakravarthysoftware.com/work_distributor in a week
tribaal 9mo ago
Not contesting your claim, but would you mind sharing what major hardware vendor you mean? I love iced and wrote a decent amount of code using it, but in my mind the biggest sponsor is system76 - and as awesome as they are they aren’t a major vendor yet :)
- okanat 9mo ago
  Has System76 started designing, or more correctly outsourcing more expensive custom motherboard designs, like Lenovo and Dell or are they still selling slightly customized white-label laptops?
nu11ptr 9mo ago
Not sure how the UI engine itself compares, but to me it is all about the available components (as a total non-designer, although AI helps with that now). The only choice I have at the moment that would meet my needs is gpui, as gpui-component now exists.

slopusila 9mo ago

what is the business case for a text editor in a code writing agent world? maybe they could pivot into the luxury boutique hand-crafted artisanal code market

dxdm 9mo ago
Text editors are for cleaning up after the agents, of course. And for crafting beautiful metaprompt files to be used by the agentic prompt-crafter intelligences that mind the grunt agents. And also for coding.

norman784 9mo ago

The thing with GPUI is that the library itself is very low level and their scope is limited (by design I suppose), the ui with components is a separate crate with GPL license, while GPUI license is Apache. As far GPUI has a great foundation, the community can built the components themselves.

iamnbutler 9mo ago

I started the gpui-ce fork but I'm becoming somewhat more interested in a fresh framework that is more aligned with the rust ecosystem in general - using crates like glam/glamour, parley, palette, etc Lots of gpui was built with build Zed/a text editor in mind directly, and as folks have mentioned here, it is hard for Zed Industries to justify work on gpui that is purely for the community. Nathan is usually pretty pragmatic around not optimizing early, and gpui is generally serving Zed's needs at the moment (from what I know, I haven't worked on Zed since July) I do think ZI would generally benefit if gpui did get pulled out of Zed if there was a community that was passionate about taking it over... but that is time and effort in itself.

iamnbutler 9mo ago
I would be curious to hear about where folks are finding gaps in the rust ui ecosystem though... I've written quite a lot of rust UI code for Zed over the past few years so I'm mostly familiar with the pros and cons of gpui, but I haven't spent much time with Iced, Dioxus, Xilem, etc.
- EnergyAmy 9mo ago
  Iced is promising, using it for a small side project. Fairly straightforward and easy to use, but lacking basic things from more mature libraries (unsurprisingly, since it's still early). If you want something like a QTreeView for example, you're on your own. It's cool that it supports WASM, though I'd call it alpha support for now.
satvikpendem 9mo ago
You might also want to look into Dioxus Native as it's doing a lot of what you're interested in too, with taffy and vello for example. The gaps I see in the Rust UI ecosystem as you asked are that I want a true cross platform solution for mobile, web, and desktop while most focus only on desktop, as I use Flutter currently for this purpose but need to pull in Rust crates through an FFI layer like flutter_rust_bridge, as well as a backend server in Rust and having to share types with the frontend through some agnostic format like GraphQL, so it'd be nice to have everything in one language. Dioxus Native does in fact bill itself as "Flutter but in Rust" which I'm looking forward to a lot. How was it like working at Zed? Any reason for leaving?