this post was submitted on 08 May 2024
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No idea, especially since MacOS has limited OpenGL support and no Vulkan support, Metal is basically the only graphics API on Mac
Yeah, even Asahi has better OpenGL support than real macOS. They make damn sure you have to use Metal to get the most out of it, just like eventually you get caught up in DirectX on Windows whether you want it or not. You can use Vulkan and OpenGL, but the OS really wants to work with Metal/DirectX buffers in the end.
I appreciate that the devs care enough to make it really good from the start, because that sets the benchmark. Now the Linux version has to have a similar enough polish to it.
In comparison, Atom and VSCode both worked fine on Linux just about day one thanks to Electron, but it was also widely disliked for the poor performance. It's a part of what Zed competes on, performance compared to VSCode.
The other guy mentioned:
And you say:
So they're on Mac bc they need Metal, but they picked Metal bc they're on a Mac? It's circular and friggin weird man
Not to mention there are cross-platform wrappers that will pick from all three depending on system - some that are very prolific among Rust devs (Zed is coded in Rust) like wgpu, for instance. They could've used wgpu and supported all 3 from the get-go and it would be easier than doing Metal anyway!
And so picking just Mac and/or Metal first is suspicious.
I don't see where your problem comes from. It's really simple: they wanted to target Mac, likely because that's their preferred platform. So obviously they use the best fitting APIs for that purpose. Why would they develop a Linux or Windows application, if what they want is Mac? Nothing suspicious about that.