Developer Voices Building the Zed Text Editor (with Nathan Sobo)
Jun 5, 2024
Nathan Sobo talks about building Zed, a text editor in Rust, focusing on UI design, performance optimization, and collaboration features. He discusses challenges in editor development, using Rust for Zed, high frame rate rendering, WebAssembly, and testing concurrent networking code. The podcast explores innovative features like TreeSitter, Language Server Protocol, and future visions for Zed, including open-sourcing components and CRDB integration.
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Unfinished Business
- Nathan Sobo, reflecting on Atom's limitations, felt motivated to create Zed.
- He envisioned a faster, textmate-like editor but lacked the tools initially.
Segment Trees
- Segment trees are key for text editor architecture.
- These copy-on-write B+ trees efficiently index and manage text manipulations.
Ropes
- Ropes, tree-like structures, store text chunks efficiently, avoiding large memory moves during edits.
- This approach enhances editing performance, especially with large files.