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