Leveraging Rust and the GPU to render user interfaces at 120 FPS
"Inspired by the gaming world, we realized that the only way to achieve the performance we needed was to build our own UI framework"<p>I'm surprised you did not look at "Dear ImGui", "Noesis", and "JUCE". All three of them are heavily used in gaming, are rather clean C++, use full GPU acceleration, and have visual editors available. Especially JUCE is used for A LOT of hard-realtime professional audio applications.<p>"When we started building Zed, arbitrary 2D graphics rendering on the GPU was still very much a research project."<p>What are you talking about? JUCE has had GPU-accelerated spline shapes and SVG animations since 2012?<p>BTW, I like the explanations for how they use SDFs for rendering basic primitives. But that technique looks an awful lot like the 2018 GPU renderer from KiCad ;) And lastly, that glyph atlas for font rendering is only 1 channel? KiCad uses a technique using RGB for gradients so that the rendered glyphs can be anti-aliased without accidentally rounding sharp corners. Overall, this reads to me like they did not do much research before starting, which is totally OK, but then they shouldn't say stuff like "did not exist" or "was still a research project".