Using mainstream libraries instead of reinventing the wheel would have been a good decision with or without VC money.

I like Zed but it's still my secondary editor because it's missing usability features that I value in other editors. I think we all benefit if they focus their attention on the parts of Zed that differentiate it rather than writing new frameworks and libraries.

You vastly overestimate the amount of pressure a board can place on an early stage startup. The far more likely scenario to me (someone who raised VC money) is that the CEO likely looked at their run rate and decided to prioritize things more aggressively. This is hardly surprising and it has nothing to do with VCs.

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.

Without such venture capital, I doubt GPUI, at least to the level of complexity it has today rather than being a toy project, would have even existed. It costs money to develop open source sustainably.

They really should focus on fixing bugs and improving basic functionality.

Eg if you edit or create a file outside of Zed, there’s a good chance it won’t show up in the file browser.

Also… multi window doesn’t exist so the multi monitor story is trash.

gpui existing in the first place is a result of them raising VC

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I recently saw a PR where the author implemented shaders but it was closed by the maintainers as the feature wasn't needed by Zed the editor.

You might also want to look into Dioxus Native as it's doing a lot of what you're interested in too, with taffy and vello for example. The gaps I see in the Rust UI ecosystem as you asked are that I want a true cross platform solution for mobile, web, and desktop while most focus only on desktop, as I use Flutter currently for this purpose but need to pull in Rust crates through an FFI layer like flutter_rust_bridge, as well as a backend server in Rust and having to share types with the frontend through some agnostic format like GraphQL, so it'd be nice to have everything in one language. Dioxus Native does in fact bill itself as "Flutter but in Rust" which I'm looking forward to a lot.

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

I would be curious to hear about where folks are finding gaps in the rust ui ecosystem though...

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.

I don't think it means they're struggling financially. I think it means they're not steering the ship alone any more, and are responsible to others. That's how accepting investment money generally works.

Ironic, because AI Agent integration is their business model.

Text editors are for cleaning up after the agents, of course. And for crafting beautiful metaprompt files to be used by the agentic prompt-crafter intelligences that mind the grunt agents. And also for coding.

Iced seems really promising, however, it's a passion project by a single developer. They very clearly stated that their goal is to follow their passions and desires first, everyone else second, and that it will always be a single person project. Their readme even discourages contributions.

Companies using it in production are often forking it as a result, and trying to keep their fork in sync. Ultimately, if the community wants iced to become a major and stable framework, it will have to be forked and a community development model built around it.

And I'm not saying this to disparage the author in any way, their readme even seems to suggest that that's exactly what they'd prefer.

I'm partial to Dioxus with their native renderer coming up, it should work cross-platform on mobile, web, desktop like Flutter (except web is actually HTML and CSS, not canvas) rather than only desktop which is what most Rust GUI frameworks are targeting.

https://github.com/DioxusLabs/blitz

Not contesting your claim, but would you mind sharing what major hardware vendor you mean?

I love iced and wrote a decent amount of code using it, but in my mind the biggest sponsor is system76 - and as awesome as they are they aren’t a major vendor yet :)

Not sure how the UI engine itself compares, but to me it is all about the available components (as a total non-designer, although AI helps with that now). The only choice I have at the moment that would meet my needs is gpui, as gpui-component now exists.

There is also Slint : https://slint.dev They are also backed by a company, and have kept a stable 1.x release for some time.