Podcast
Zed - Conrad Irwin, Open Source Developer
Next to writing their own operating system, another dream shared by many developers is building their own text editor. Conrad Irwin, a software engineer at Zed, is doing just that. Zed is a fully extensible, open-source text editor written entirely in Rust. It’s fast, lightweight, and comes with excellent language support out of the box.
In the first episode of the third season, I sit down with Conrad to discuss Zed’s mission to build a next-generation text editor and why it was necessary to rebuild the very foundation of text editing software from scratch to achieve their goals.
Show Notes
About Zed Industries
Zed isn’t afraid of daunting tasks. Not only have they built a text editor from scratch, but they’ve also developed their own GUI toolkit, implemented advanced parsing techniques like tree-sitter, and integrated multi-user collaboration features directly into the editor. Zed is a text editor built for the future, with meticulous attention to detail and a focus on exceptional performance.
About Conrad Irwin
Before joining Zed, Conrad worked on Superhuman, an email client renowned for its speed and efficiency. He is a seasoned developer with a deep understanding of performance optimization and building fast, reliable software. Conrad is passionate about open-source software and is a strong advocate for Rust. He’s also an excellent pair-programming partner and invites people to join him while working on Zed.
Links From The Episode (In Chronological Order)
- Superhuman - High-performance email client known for its speed and efficiency
- Visual Studio Code - Popular, extensible code editor
- Neovim - Vim-based text editor focused on extensibility and usability
- gpui crate - Zed’s custom GUI toolkit for building fast, native user interfaces
- Leptos - Rust framework for building reactive web applications
- Dioxus - Rust library for building cross-platform user interfaces
- Tokio - Asynchronous runtime for Rust, powering many network applications
- async-std - Asynchronous version of the Rust standard library
- smol - Small and fast async runtime for Rust
- Glommio - Thread-per-core Rust async framework with a Linux-specific runtime
- isahc - HTTP client library that supports multiple async runtimes
AsyncRead,AsyncWritetraits- Zed Editor YouTube channel - Official channel for Zed editor tutorials and updates
- Tree-sitter - Parser generator tool and incremental parsing library
- Semgrep - Static analysis tool for finding and preventing bugs
- Zed release changelogs - Official changelog for Zed editor releases
- matklad’s blog post: “Flat Is Better Than Nested” - Discusses organizing large Rust projects with a flat structure
- rust-analyzer - Advanced language server for Rust, providing IDE-like features
- Protobuf Rust crate - Protocol Buffers implementation for Rust
- Postcard - Compact serialization format for Rust, designed for resource-constrained systems
- CBOR - Concise Binary Object Representation, a data format similar to JSON but more compact
- MessagePack - Efficient binary serialization format
- RON (Rusty Object Notation) - Simple readable data serialization format similar to Rust syntax
- James Munns’ blog - Embedded systems expert and Rust consultant’s blog
- Delve - Debugger for the Go programming language
- LLDB - Next generation, high-performance debugger used with Rust and other LLVM languages
Official Links
About corrode
"Rust in Production" is a podcast by corrode, a company that helps teams adopt Rust. We offer training, consulting, and development services to help you succeed with Rust. If you want to learn more about how we can help you, please get in touch.