#105 Nathan Sobo's Pursuit of the Ultimate Code Editor
Oct 13, 2024
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Nathan Sobo, co-founder of Zed and a former contributor to Atom and Electron, shares his journey in crafting a revolutionary code editor. He delves into the challenges of collaborative editing and the role of CRDTs, revealing how unique identifiers are essential for effective data structures. Discussions also touch on the innovative GPUI framework for enhanced GPU performance, and the impact of AI on coding practices. Sobo sheds light on balancing traditional development methods with AI capabilities, aiming to transform the developer experience.
Nathan Sobo's journey highlights the importance of blending lightweight and powerful features in creating an ideal collaborative code editor.
The transition from Atom to Zed emphasizes the significance of utilizing Rust for enhanced performance and real-time collaboration capabilities.
Integrating AI in Zed aims to empower developers with intelligent assistance, optimizing coding practices through features like Live Diffs and inline suggestions.
Deep dives
The Vision of Building the Ultimate Code Editor
The speaker shares his journey towards creating an ideal code editor, starting from his early experiences with various editors like Emacs and Eclipse. This pursuit began in 2006, influenced by a desire to combine the lightweight nature of TextMate with the power and features of Eclipse, aiming to enhance the coding experience through advanced parsing techniques. The vision evolved further with experiences in pair programming that added the concept of collaboration, leading to an emphasis on building a social code editor. The speaker conveys a strong passion for crafting an editor that integrates seamlessly into the modern collaborative programming environment.
Collaboration and the Role of GitHub
After years of working on his editor concept, the speaker's path crossed with GitHub during a rite of celebration at which the idea of developing a collaborative code editor was reignited. The introduction of the Atom editor followed, showcasing a shared vision to create a platform that invited collaborative coding while retaining user intimacy and performance. The collaboration between the speaker and GitHub representatives allowed the inception of Atom, which sought to provide a user-friendly experience on top of a powerful engine. However, the speaker reflects on the challenges faced, particularly around performance due to the limitations inherent in JavaScript frameworks used at the time.
The Transition to Zed and the Push for Performance
After the realities of working on Atom set in and before moving on to the next phase, the speaker recognized the need to start anew, leading to the birth of Zed. Utilizing Rust as the core programming language marked a significant departure from previous technologies, allowing for better performance, threading, and responsiveness. The design of Zed embraced multi-threading capabilities, crucial for speed and real-time collaboration, ensuring that editing experiences remained smooth and uninterrupted. The speaker elaborates on how decisions made during the transition directly aimed at addressing issues encountered during previous endeavors while aiming to create a high-performance environment.
Incorporating AI into the Development Process
The conversation explores the integration of artificial intelligence in Zed and the impact of generative models on coding practices. The speaker acknowledges the significant potential of AI-powered tools to enhance coding efficiency by enabling real-time assistance, inline code transformations, and supporting developer workflows. Features like Live Diffs allow AI to suggest changes and consolidate recommendations across multiple files seamlessly, leveraging the robust structure of the CRDT. This integration aims to empower developers by providing them with customized and intelligent assistance to aid their coding journey, further optimizing the use of Zed.
The Future of Zed: Hiring and Community Focus
In the final segment, the speaker discusses the growing need for talent to help propel Zed into its next chapters, emphasizing a collaborative company culture that values product-building and learning. The aim is to attract individuals who are passionate about developing user-oriented solutions using Rust while remaining focused on achieving high performance. This goal aligns with the company's ethos of shipping quickly, learning continuously, and not fearing mistakes but instead embracing them as part of the growth process. Overall, this outlook sets a tone of optimism and excitement for the future of Zed and the tools it provides for developers.
Nathan Sobo is co-founder of Zed, a super-fast, collaborative, AI-powered, code editor. We chat about his journey to build the ultimate code editor: lessons learned from building Atom, Electron and its challenges, CRDTs, Rust native GPU GUIs, AI Code Assistants, and more CRDTs.