The History, Present, and Future of Code Editors: From Electron to Rust and GPU-Driven Modern Architecture (A Case Study of Zed)

Code editors are the most essential tools developers interact with daily. Over the past decade, the birth of Atom brought web frontend technologies (DOM/JS) to desktop applications, spawning the Electron framework and establishing VS Code's dominance. However, this also introduced hidden concerns regarding performance and memory consumption.

This session will take the audience through the history of this second "Editor War." We will first analyze Atom's technical architecture and the reasons for its downfall, exploring how VS Code won developers over through its robust extension ecosystem. Next, we will shift our focus to Zed—an open-source editor rebuilt from the ground up by Atom's core team.

The session will deep dive into how Zed abandons heavy web frameworks, utilizing Rust and its in-house GPUI framework to render UI components directly via the GPU, achieving an ultimate typing experience at 120 FPS. Furthermore, we will explore how modern editors natively integrate MCP/ACP protocols in the AI era, along with practical insights from the speaker's active contributions to the Zed open-source community. Whether you are a tooling enthusiast, a Rust developer, or an engineer interested in low-level architecture, you will find valuable technical inspiration in this talk.