[HN Gopher] Building a platform that open sources itself
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Building a platform that open sources itself
Author : signa11
Score : 84 points
Date : 2023-06-15 08:36 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (zed.dev)
(TXT) w3m dump (zed.dev)
| fermigier wrote:
| A first step to "open source oneself" would be to choose and
| communicate on an open source (i.e. OSI approved) licence.
| norir wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| jasim wrote:
| 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.
| james2doyle wrote:
| 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
| kaliqt wrote:
| 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.
| kabirgoel wrote:
| Zed has copilot support. I've been using it, and it works
| pretty well.
| GarethX wrote:
| They have Copilot: https://zed.dev/blog/copilot
| colesantiago wrote:
| So basically the Zed editor will be open source?
| tommica wrote:
| 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
| JohnFen wrote:
| I don't understand how this "open sources itself". That very
| phrase makes no sense to me.
|
| What do they mean?
| ikornaselur wrote:
| 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?
| JohnFen wrote:
| > 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"?
| pfist wrote:
| > 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)
| senko wrote:
| 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
| [deleted]
| katspaugh wrote:
| 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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