Nathan Sobo recently open-sourced Zed, a code editor that focuses on performance, integrates AI capabilities, and supports software teams’ collaboration out of the box. For performance, Zed leverages a Rust code base, multicore- and GPU-optimized code, with a custom Rust GUI framework. For collaboration, Zed relies on CRDTs and team channels. Zed is currently Mac only.
I mean on the one hand, the hardware acceleration is awesome. The GUI toolkit is not of course (I assume MacOS has a default one to make everything look like it belongs?), but at least they made it look like a native app instead of the usual electron shit where it’s clearly a web page with a window border and some design 15y old me might think is cool but 16y old me would already have been ashamed of.
As I understand, GUI toolkits will usually support various widget styles or “Look and Feels”.
So, they can just use a glossy graphic for a button on macOS and a flat graphic on Windows 11, without having to reimplement the whole application in the native toolkit. It will usually not feel entirely native, but at least, it won’t look out of place…