[nu11ptr]

From the PR, it sounds like the switch to WGPU is only for linux. The team was reluctant to do the same for macOS/Windows since they felt their native renderer on those platforms was better and less memory intensive.

[swiftcoder]

> they felt their native renderer on those platforms was better and less memory intensive

This definitely would be worth some profiling. I don't think it's a given that their custom stacks are going to beat wgpu in a meaningful way.

[nicoburns]

> This definitely would be worth some profiling. I don't think it's a given that their custom stacks are going to beat wgpu in a meaningful way.

They probably will for memory usage. Current wgpu seems to have a floor around ~100mb that isn't there with other rendering backends (and it was more like ~60mb with wgpu a few months / versions ago).

Not sure if this is fixable in wgpu, or do with spec compatibility (my guess would be that it's fixable, just not top priority for the team atm).

[MindSpunk]

WGPU is just a layer over the top of the native APIs on any given platform so unless Zed's DirectX/Metal renderers were particularly bad it's unlikely WGPU will be better here.

[flohofwoe]

WebGPU has some surprising performance problems (although I only checked Google's Dawn library, not Rust's wgpu), and the amount of code that's pulled into the project is massive. A well-made Metal renderer which only implements the needed features will easily be 100x smaller (in terms of linecount) and most likely faster.

[vitorsr]

Please elaborate, I am curious to why would you think WebGPU would meaningfully beat their Metal/DirectX renderers.

[ZeroCool2u]

Yes, but they can add a flag to switch renderers on startup like they had for blade.