[as-cii]

Hey xlii! This is Antonio, author of the post.

You're right that rendering is only part of the story. To stay within the ~8ms frame budget, however, every little bit counts. Maintaining application state, layout, painting, and finally pushing pixels to screen, all need to be as performant as they can be.

For layout specifically we're using an approach inspired by Flutter, which lets us avoid complex algorithms but still have a lot of flexibility in the way elements can be positioned and produce a rich graphical experience.

Thanks for reading and commenting!

[xlii]

I don't have experience with Flutter, but based on quick glance they're using widgeting and, what I found quite important - ability to develop GUI outside of the application. Something that I think libraries like egui are missing (and which is easily obtainable with Tauri/Dioxus).

Rebuilding whole app to ensure that some box doesn't get cut off ruins development experience, especially for big apps.

Kudos to you guys, I hope you'll make Zed extensible, so that instead of writing my own editor I can use yours ;-)