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Rust in Production

Zed with Conrad Irwin

Thu, 17 Oct 2024

Description

Next to writing their own operating system, another dream shared by many developers is building their own text editor. Conrad Irwin, a software engineer at Zed, is doing just that. Zed is a fully extensible, open-source text editor written entirely in Rust. It's fast, lightweight, and comes with excellent language support out of the box.In the first episode of the third season, I sit down with Conrad to discuss Zed's mission to build a next-generation text editor and why it was necessary to rebuild the very foundation of text editing software from scratch to achieve their goals.

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Full Episode

2.125 - 23.287 Matthias Endler

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?

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23.786 - 44.857 Conrad Irwin

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.

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46.024 - 68.646 Matthias Endler

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?

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68.726 - 72.647 Matthias Endler

I guess you hear that a lot, but I want to hear the answer from you. Makes sense.

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72.827 - 90.656 Conrad Irwin

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?

91.636 - 107.794 Conrad Irwin

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.

108.354 - 129.164 Conrad Irwin

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.

129.904 - 141.652 Conrad Irwin

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.

142.172 - 154.54 Conrad Irwin

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.

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