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nathansobo

1,072 karma · joined June 20, 2010

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nathansobo··on Rust cross-platform GPUI components
GPUI has a mature scheduling story, letting you “block” the main thread on spawned tasks with async/await. It also comes with a deterministic random test scheduler for driving out timing bugs.
nathansobo··on Zed, a collaborative code editor, is now open source
Wow Brian, nice to hear from you. Thanks very much for your words! I remember you setting a new standard of speed for me when we worked together!
nathansobo··on Zed, the new code editor from Atom developers, has entered open beta
Hey, we're actively working to get in touch with a new lawyer to help us do a better job with this. I agree this isn't cool. I was rushed to get the launch out and didn't review the terms carefully enough. We will try to do better going forward. Our goal is to be respectful.
nathansobo··on Atom was archived today
The former Atom team and some new friends are building a new editor over at https://zed.dev. We're using our own Rust-based UI framework instead of Electron so it's really fast, and real-time collaboration is baked into the core.
nathansobo··on Using CRDTs for multiplayer text editing
Hey, thanks for the heads up. I screwed it up once and duplicated it through everything. Going to fix it. He was too important to insult by misspelling his name.
nathansobo··on Using CRDTs for multiplayer text editing
We’ve gone to great lengths to abstract out the platform dependencies. Adding a platform right now doesn’t teach us enough for it to be worth it just yet, but we’re seriously planning for it.
nathansobo··on Using CRDTs for multiplayer text editing
I have always found CRDTs a lot easier to wrap my brain around. Agreed with Joseph that optimizing them is non-trivial. In Teletype for Atom, we indexed fragments in splay trees, and each text fragment was actually a member of two splay trees at the same time: one for the full document, another for the pieces of the original insertion as they'd been split apart. We would find the insertion fragment in the insertion tree, then walk parent pointers in the document tree to locate it. In Zed, we have two trees, but can't do this double embedding because we use persistent data structures where parent pointers are not an option. So we instead have insertion trees that map subslices of inserted text to fragment ordered identifiers, which we use for lookup in the main document B-tree. These fragment identifiers were themselves inspired by another CRDT paper called Logoot, but we don't actually send them over the wire.
nathansobo··on Using CRDTs for multiplayer text editing
I've been interested in them since the early days of Atom, but it's just taken a while for me to develop as an engineer and build a system around the theory that puts them to practical use.
nathansobo··on Using CRDTs for multiplayer text editing
We honestly don’t solve it yet, but haven’t found it that big of an issue in practice. Would be curious to see the best resource on it.
nathansobo··on Using CRDTs for multiplayer text editing
Thanks very much!
nathansobo··on Using CRDTs for multiplayer text editing
We embeded a lot of videos for animated diagrams. I think we need to disable autoplay, at least on mobile.
nathansobo··on Using CRDTs for multiplayer text editing
We're quite happy with them. Why do you find them annoying?
nathansobo··on Sunsetting Atom
Definitely a priority.
nathansobo··on Sunsetting Atom
"Real real fast"
nathansobo··on Sunsetting Atom
We're pure Rust and hopefully faster. But yeah, plenty of competition in the space!
nathansobo··on Sunsetting Atom
Our goal is to build something substantially better than VS Code.
nathansobo··on Sunsetting Atom
We plan to start blogging about this pretty soon.
nathansobo··on Sunsetting Atom
This would only be for the web. Right now we're macOS only and target Metal.
nathansobo··on Sunsetting Atom
We just wanted to be pure Rust and have complete control.
nathansobo··on Sunsetting Atom
Thanks very much!
nathansobo··on Sunsetting Atom
Earlier this year Keith Simmons, the author of Neovide (https://github.com/neovide/neovide), joined our team. He's been working on Vim bindings and paying a lot of attention to getting it right. As you probably know there's a lot of surface area, so this will take time.
nathansobo··on Sunsetting Atom
When we started on Zed the Rust UI framework space was much younger. In absence of a mature solution that met our exact needs, the simplest path for us was to build it ourselves. We're too far into things now to change at this point.
nathansobo··on Sunsetting Atom
Here's a demo from a talk a give not too long ago:

https://youtu.be/wXT73bBr83s?list=PL3TSF5whlprXqwYNIM0X8mBzu...

nathansobo··on Sunsetting Atom
We do have plans. Stay tuned!
nathansobo··on Sunsetting Atom
Very much so. As the first Electron app we were so excited about people being able to do anything they imagined. It was cool but ended up really constraining us. This time we really want to drive our API based on the most important things people actually need to extend. We need to navigate the trade-offs more intelligently.
nathansobo··on Sunsetting Atom
We have graphics, but I could see a mode where you `scp` a headless moon lander version of Zed up to a remote server to do remote development. VS Code has a feature like this but I hadn't used it much before switching to Zed full-time.
nathansobo··on Sunsetting Atom
We plan to compile to WebAssembly that writes pixels to a WebGL canvas.
nathansobo··on Sunsetting Atom
Fabulous point. Always good to have solid contingency plans.
nathansobo··on Sunsetting Atom
Sure, cross-platform UI that's on the metal is a more accurate description.
nathansobo··on Sunsetting Atom
Thanks very much for your kind words and wishes!
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