Building a platform that open sources itself | Hacker News Reader

Building a platform that open sources itself

zed.dev

91 pointssigna1116 comments

To save non-Apple users the trouble, as of May 3 '23:

> Cross platform support is still very much on our radar and we’re dedicated to support both Windows and Linux in the future

A first step to "open source oneself" would be to choose and communicate on an open source (i.e. OSI approved) licence.

I don't understand how this "open sources itself". That very phrase makes no sense to me.

What do they mean?

Kind of sounds like they're just open sourcing the development of a platform.. On the platform?

Like if Github had the source for github public on github? Sounds a bit weird though, as its not "open sourcing itself", what ever that would really be

Edit: actually, I'm more confused now. Zed is just an editor? Not a platform?

> Kind of sounds like they're just open sourcing the development of a platform.. On the platform?

That is also a sentence that doesn't make sense to me. Are they perhaps meaning something different than usual by the term "open source"?

> Are they perhaps meaning something different than usual by the term "open source"?

It seems that way to me. From what I can gather after reading the article, it seems they are:

1. Developing Zed in the open 2. Allowing anyone to watch and give feedback on the development from within Zed itself (it looks sort of like IRC channels in the screenshots) 3. Eventually allowing people in those channels to actively participate in the development live (sounds like Google Docs meets GitHub pull requests)

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?

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/

[2] https://zed.dev/blog/videogame

I think it's a pretty sweet concept. I saw you guys are hiring an AI engineer. That's basically the main thing that would hold me back, I want copilot or better. It makes coding much simpler.

VSCode has a massive ecosystem of plugins, that's hard to go without. However, they're not all that necessary. AI assistance and SSH (remote into a server and have the IDE take on that machine, so browse the files, access the terminal, etc.) are the main two requirements for any IDE for me.

Zed has copilot support. I’ve been using it, and it works pretty well.

They have Copilot: https://zed.dev/blog/copilot

I've been using Zed for a few days now, and it is really nice!

I tend to use JetBrains IDEs for development and Sublime Text for everything else, with VSCode being an "if I don't have any other choice" option.

Zed is already feeling like a great meld of IntellJ and Sublime - the features of an IDE with the lightness of Sublime, and excellent aesthetics that Atom was once known for.

I'm also a Sublime user and am excited about Zed. Once they have more options for adding LSP clients (they support limited languages and one client per language) and snippets, then I think it will really take off

Just took the editor for a quick spin, and it's kinda neat in it simplicity - of course being in beta means that lot of features is missing so maybe that is why it feels so responsive

So basically the Zed editor will be open source?

I've just tried the editor and noticed an issue: the "O" in "Open a project ⌘O" looks a lot like 0.

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