Comment by tptacek
6 days ago
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.
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