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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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Zed on Linux is out! (zed.dev)

submitted 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Zed is a modern open-source code editor, built from the ground up in Rust with a GPU-accelerated renderer.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

At this point I'm not expert enough to explain more details. You can check font renderers.

Below is what's in my mind but it's just a guess.

In typical PC architectures you have IO between the storage and the RAM, and then there's the copying from the RAM to the VRAM, and editors maybe also want copying from the VRAM to RAM for decoration purposes etc.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

I am familiar with the current PC and GPU architectures.

IO is a non issue. Even a massive file can be trivially memory mapped and parsed without much hassle, and in the case of a text editor you'd have to deal with IO only when opening or saving said file, not during rendering.

As for the rendering side, again, the amount of memory you'd have to transfer between RAM and VRAM would be minimal. The issue is latency, not speed, but that can be mitigated though asynchonous transfer operations, so if done properly stutters are unlikely.

Rendering monospaced fonts (with decorators and control characters) at thousands of frames a second nowadays is computationally trivial, take a look at refterm for an example. I suspect non-monospaced fonts would require more effort, but it's doable.

As I said at the beginning, it's not impossible, just a pain. But so is font rendering in general honestly :/

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

As I indicated, please check (articles and the documentations of) font renderers at this point.