Zed with Conrad Irwin
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This is Rust in Production, a podcast about companies who use Rust to shape the future of infrastructure. My name is Matthias Endler from Corot, and today we're talking to Conrad Irvin from Zed about building a high-performance code editor in Rust. Conrad, thanks for being here. Can you quickly introduce yourself and Zed, the company you work for?
Yep. I'm Conrad. I work at Zed, which is trying to build the next generation of text editor. Coding at the speed of thought is our motto. Prior to Zed, I built Superhuman, which is also focused on speed, building the fastest email client in the world. So I really like building tools that make people get what they need to get done faster and easier. And that's how I found myself working on Zed.
It's pretty amazing. I have to say, I'm a set user myself. I completely switched from VS Code. And I can tell you the experience so far is fantastic. You did a great job. And this is also why I wanted to talk to you folks. First off, in your words... What's wrong with the existing editors? What are some pain points? Why do we need another editor? I guess you hear that a lot, but I want to hear the answer from you. Makes sense.
I think there's kind of two approaches to think about. One of which is, as you look at the world today, everything is collaborative by default. People are designing in Figma, docs are in Google Docs, and then programmers are still stuck, kind of each person editing their own file and then git commit, git push. Oh no, what happened to my git commits? It seems ludicrous that we don't have real-time collaboration for code. And so that was one of the key kind of design things is how do we build real-time collaboration incorrectly? But we knew that if we wanted to persuade people that they wanted to use that, it also needed to be better than what's out there. And if you compare it to something like a VS Code, you can take the browser emulator and the extensions APIs and all of that stuff that makes VS Code kind of slow and clunky and rebuild it natively in Rust and using an actual fast GPU native rendering. So taking more of kind of like the React approach and like a game would be built.
On the other side, you have things like Vim, which are fast and people love them for the speed and the ease, but they don't work with any of the modern tools. So you spend all your time configuring language servers and like breaking plugins and fixing plugins and breaking plugins. And so we wanted to make something that had this kind of trio of collaborative, extremely fast and just works out of the box. So really helping people get their work done, like not spending time configuring your editor, if that makes sense.
If Z didn't exist, which editor would you use?
Well, before it did exist, I kept switching between NeoVim and VS Code. VS Code, because I like the language servers and all of that stuff, but it would just frustrate me too often. So I'd go back to NeoVim where I know how to be productive. And so I've spent a lot of my time making Zed's Vim mode work for me and for the other people who use Vim. So that's been fun.
Yeah, and you did a great job there. I have to say there are very few gaps in the Vim support by now. It wasn't the case just half a year ago, but just seeing the rapid development is really, really good, really surprising. And also I found myself switching between VS Code and NeoVim as well. So every time I became sick of VS Code's laggy performance, I would switch to NeoVim only to find out that the configuration was a bit of a hassle. And so I have to switch back at some point. Exactly.
And so you're kind of the ideal target user, someone who wants better things from their tools. And so building that the right way has been very fun.
Did that also entail any differences in how Z is architectured in comparison to other editors? Or was it just mostly Rust's performance that made it so snappy?
Rust definitely helps a lot. It's not JavaScript, which is really nice. But one of the things that we do that is very different is that we render like a game renders. So each frame, so every 8 milliseconds or 16 milliseconds, we redraw the entire screen to the GPU.
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