Zed released a macOS beta in March 2023 and a Linux build in June 2024; Windows work began in early 2024 and currently exists as a closed-alpha or source build. Four engineers recently focused on the Windows port after earlier contributions from Junkui Zhang. Zed uses a Rust GPU-accelerated UI framework called GPUI to maximize performance, rendering via native graphics APIs: Metal/MSL on macOS and Blade/Vulkan on Linux. Blade caused ARM64 issues on Windows, so the team adopted DirectX 11 for better performance and lower memory usage, which requires maintaining three shader implementations. A 1.0 release is targeted by end of 2025, with Windows support planned.
The first beta release of Zed was in March 2023, but for macOS only. A published Linux build followed in June 2024. Work on a Windows port has been ongoing since early 2024, initially with contributor Junkui Zhang providing most of the commits, but Brunfield said that Zed has had four engineers working on the port for the past six weeks. The current status is that a Windows build is in closed alpha, or can be built from source.
Developing a cross-platform application that supports Windows is not so hard for those using frameworks such as Qt (a framework primarily for C++), but the Zed team decided to use its own GPU-accelerated UI framework for Rust, called GPUI, in order to optimize performance. This means using a graphics API to render the user interface. On macOS this is Metal and MSL (Metal Shading Language), and on Linux the Blade API which wraps Vulkan, a cross-platform graphics API from Khronos.
The Zed team initially used Blade for Windows as well, but ran into problems on ARM64 builds of Windows. The latest code uses DirectX 11 instead, the native Windows graphics API. This runs better and with a lower memory footprint, but it means supporting three implementations of Zed's GPU shaders. Brunfields' post has more details.
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