> We gotta focus on some business relevant work in 2026

Remember that post announcing the millions of VC capital they raised? This is the result

Without such venture capital, I doubt GPUI, at least to the level of complexity it has today rather than being a toy project, would have even existed. It costs money to develop open source sustainably.

GPUI development predates Sequoia's funding by about two years.

Companies start with founders funding themselves through savings and friends and family rounds before institutional investors are usually even interested. But make no mistake, they start it as a commercial venture, otherwise they wouldn't have taken VC in the first place, nevermind that VCs wouldn't have funded it if not for their pitch on how it could become a billion dollar company.

And since Sequoia? It is primarily the Zed team working full time on it, which costs money.

IMGUI and other GPU accelerated toolkits exist and have been created without billons of VC revenue.

In fact the entire Qt group is just work 650m EUR

Who said anything about billions? I just said that it costs money to pay people to work on OSS, which is accurate as ImGui is sponsored by companies and Qt is a commercial entity with infamous licensing. VC doesn't necessarily mean billions in funding.

What's that, doing actual work rather than labor-of-love open source stuff? Seems reasonable.

Did you not raise a bunch of money from Sequoia? Sounds like you're in a perfect place to quit your job and hack on GPUI for us.

>What's that, doing actual work rather than labor-of-love open source stuff?

except the 'labor-of-love' stuff is what set the editor apart and why real users were choosing it and the 'actual business work' the moneymen are eager about is exactly what's in every other editor and what nobody asked for

They wrote GPUI as a business decision, to focus on performance, because they knew that that would be a core differentiator to all the other IDEs out there that use Electron for example. That they also liked writing it (as a "labor of love") is incidental.

Didn't they also invent Electron for their Atom editor when working at GitHub? Which then was hijacked by Microsoft and VS Code. Was Electron (Atom Shell) a core differentiator of Atom? Absolutely. Was it a business decision? No, it was a dream to use javascript/html/css to build a desktop editor. I think, similarly, Zed was an experiment to build a modern desktop app without any C++ legacy or OS API wrappers.

Those creators own their company in the case of Zed, so it is a business decision. Otherwise they could've just gone with Electron again. The business decision is that they wanted to be different in the market, the speed of vim with the IDE capability of VSCode.

You vastly overestimate the amount of pressure a board can place on an early stage startup. The far more likely scenario to me (someone who raised VC money) is that the CEO likely looked at their run rate and decided to prioritize things more aggressively. This is hardly surprising and it has nothing to do with VCs.

Doesn't it have something to do with VCs? Does the company behind Zed actually make any money on their own?

I mean, in the sense that they are VC funded and so I guess you can tie anything back to VCs? You could just as easily say it has something to do with the founders mother, who gave birth to them.

No, I don't think you could easily say that. You can't say it literally has nothing to do with VCs when VCs are the only reason they're able to keep operating financially.

The founder's mother is the only reason they're able to operate at all.

If you want to talk about the VC I think you'll need to get more specific.

What are you even talking about?

I really couldn't have been clearer. The implication was that Zed made a decision because of pressure from a VC. I said that they were vastly overestimating the pressure a VC can exert on an early stage company.

You've then pointed out that the company is directly tied to the VC, which is true but just as relevant as saying that the company is tied to the founder's parents. You've failed to explain what different there is between the VC and a parent other than that there's a causal link in the existence of the company.

So I suggested that you substantiate that difference if you want to make a point about the VC.

I don't know what is confusing about this.

Using mainstream libraries instead of reinventing the wheel would have been a good decision with or without VC money.

I like Zed but it's still my secondary editor because it's missing usability features that I value in other editors. I think we all benefit if they focus their attention on the parts of Zed that differentiate it rather than writing new frameworks and libraries.

Isn’t the thing that differentiates zed actually largely its performance? Using electron or GTK or whatever would not differentiate it in this way.

They're switching to wgpu (another performant Rust library), not GTK or electron

I think the parent meant that Zed could not have used an established UI library like GTK or Electron since performance was such a big focus of the editor.

Yes, so I'm glad Zed at least did spend the time to reinvent the wheel, because it benefits everyone to focus on performance, not to mention we have a high quality piece of OSS at the end of it, as even if it's paused development for now, it can still be forked or otherwise iterated upon.

> Using electron or GTK or whatever

You say that like they're in the same category, but one is an embedded Chromium and the other a native windowing toolkit.

They really should focus on fixing bugs and improving basic functionality.

Eg if you edit or create a file outside of Zed, there’s a good chance it won’t show up in the file browser.

Also… multi window doesn’t exist so the multi monitor story is trash.

gpui existing in the first place is a result of them raising VC

Does this mean they’re struggling financially?

Yet more disruption caused by coding agents, I’m sure. We saw it quite visibly with Tailwind, now I can see if code editors are maybe struggling too, especially something like Zed which was probably still used mostly by early adopter type People, who have early adopted TUI coding agents instead.

I only use cursor and zed to browse code now.

I don't think it means they're struggling financially. I think it means they're not steering the ship alone any more, and are responsible to others. That's how accepting investment money generally works.

Now it is, after their pivot from remote pair programming via collaborative text editing, not originally.

While unfortunate, to me this just says any user requested features aren't going to get merged anytime soon. As is, it already runs on windows/linux/mac, and will need to do so maturely for Zed to function. Therefore, to me, this isn't that big of a deal, and when they need things like web support (on their roadmap), they will then add that.

I'm curious... does anyone have any PRs or features that they feel need merging in order to use GPUI in their own projects? (other than web support)

I recently saw a PR where the author implemented shaders but it was closed by the maintainers as the feature wasn't needed by Zed the editor.

Thanks. I probably could have answered my own question had I simply looked here:

https://github.com/gpui-ce/gpui-ce/pulls

and here:

https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/pulls?q=is%3Apr+is%3Ao...

Sadly it doesn't actually look like gpui-ce has any activity, the maintainer merged one pull request (literally, #1) and then stopped. They should've just added more community maintainers to the GPUI repo directly rather than having a fork.

Yeah, why fork and create confusion if you don't plan to do anything with it?

The creator replied: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47005761

Iced.rs is probably the better UI library anyways in the long run as it’s backed by a major hardware vendor.

https://iced.rs

Not contesting your claim, but would you mind sharing what major hardware vendor you mean?

I love iced and wrote a decent amount of code using it, but in my mind the biggest sponsor is system76 - and as awesome as they are they aren’t a major vendor yet :)

Has System76 started designing, or more correctly outsourcing more expensive custom motherboard designs, like Lenovo and Dell or are they still selling slightly customized white-label laptops?

I'm partial to Dioxus with their native renderer coming up, it should work cross-platform on mobile, web, desktop like Flutter (except web is actually HTML and CSS, not canvas) rather than only desktop which is what most Rust GUI frameworks are targeting.

https://github.com/DioxusLabs/blitz

Dioxus is the real deal. It makes it super easy to create web-apps

I went from knowing nothing about web stuff to building this tool https://chakravarthysoftware.com/work_distributor in a week

Not sure how the UI engine itself compares, but to me it is all about the available components (as a total non-designer, although AI helps with that now). The only choice I have at the moment that would meet my needs is gpui, as gpui-component now exists.

Iced seems really promising, however, it's a passion project by a single developer. They very clearly stated that their goal is to follow their passions and desires first, everyone else second, and that it will always be a single person project. Their readme even discourages contributions.

Companies using it in production are often forking it as a result, and trying to keep their fork in sync. Ultimately, if the community wants iced to become a major and stable framework, it will have to be forked and a community development model built around it.

And I'm not saying this to disparage the author in any way, their readme even seems to suggest that that's exactly what they'd prefer.

Isn't System76 supporting and contributing to iced?

Yes, and I believe the main developer works for Kraken who use it for one of their apps.

Yes, but they maintain their own fork and are good about syncing. It's still not an ideal model long term.

This is silly. Definitely use Iced.rs, no one cares about it’s early pre-1.0 state. It has good fundamentals and is easy to use. 99% of people on here aren’t building anything more than a vanity project anyways.

There is also Slint : https://slint.dev They are also backed by a company, and have kept a stable 1.x release for some time.

Slint is essentially proprietary-only. Licensing a library as GPLv3 severely limits where it can or should be used.

what is the business case for a text editor in a code writing agent world?

maybe they could pivot into the luxury boutique hand-crafted artisanal code market

Text editors are for cleaning up after the agents, of course. And for crafting beautiful metaprompt files to be used by the agentic prompt-crafter intelligences that mind the grunt agents. And also for coding.

The thing with GPUI is that the library itself is very low level and their scope is limited (by design I suppose), the ui with components is a separate crate with GPL license, while GPUI license is Apache.

As far GPUI has a great foundation, the community can built the components themselves.

I started the gpui-ce fork but I'm becoming somewhat more interested in a fresh framework that is more aligned with the rust ecosystem in general - using crates like glam/glamour, parley, palette, etc

Lots of gpui was built with build Zed/a text editor in mind directly, and as folks have mentioned here, it is hard for Zed Industries to justify work on gpui that is purely for the community. Nathan is usually pretty pragmatic around not optimizing early, and gpui is generally serving Zed's needs at the moment (from what I know, I haven't worked on Zed since July)

I do think ZI would generally benefit if gpui did get pulled out of Zed if there was a community that was passionate about taking it over... but that is time and effort in itself.

I would be curious to hear about where folks are finding gaps in the rust ui ecosystem though...

I've written quite a lot of rust UI code for Zed over the past few years so I'm mostly familiar with the pros and cons of gpui, but I haven't spent much time with Iced, Dioxus, Xilem, etc.

Iced is promising, using it for a small side project. Fairly straightforward and easy to use, but lacking basic things from more mature libraries (unsurprisingly, since it's still early). If you want something like a QTreeView for example, you're on your own. It's cool that it supports WASM, though I'd call it alpha support for now.

You might also want to look into Dioxus Native as it's doing a lot of what you're interested in too, with taffy and vello for example. The gaps I see in the Rust UI ecosystem as you asked are that I want a true cross platform solution for mobile, web, and desktop while most focus only on desktop, as I use Flutter currently for this purpose but need to pull in Rust crates through an FFI layer like flutter_rust_bridge, as well as a backend server in Rust and having to share types with the frontend through some agnostic format like GraphQL, so it'd be nice to have everything in one language. Dioxus Native does in fact bill itself as "Flutter but in Rust" which I'm looking forward to a lot.

How was it like working at Zed? Any reason for leaving?

Cool, I'll take a look.

gpui will support web eventually - we always planned it, and i've tinkered with some folks on the team on it a bit. The problem is the crate needs to split into core/web/native (and maybe mobile?) as web needs a new executor and native has a number of deps that won't play nice with wasm...

someone did get a very claude-driven demo of gpui on the web up (you can find it in the discord somewhere.)

I would love that too though, a true cross platform solution.

> How was it like working at Zed? Any reason for leaving?

Working at Zed was great. I was employee #4 (#1 after the founders) - it was fun, often hard - Nathan & co helped me learn Rust and I fell in love with it.

I wanted to do something pretty specific (tl;dr, basically skunkworks type work) which was the reason I left.

There are always pros and cons to every role, but I appreciate that Zed is building from the ground up. DeltaDB will be very exciting - we were sitting on our hands waiting for it for a lot of the really exciting things we wanted to do with Zed.

Having to take on investors is never awesome - but as much as I don't like it, I do doubt Zed would never have existed without them.

But yeah, getting paid to design and write rust UI every day was a blast.