alt Hacker News> they felt their native renderer on those platforms was better and less memory intensive
This definitely would be worth some profiling. I don't think it's a given that their custom stacks are going to beat wgpu in a meaningful way.
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WebGPU has some surprising performance problems (although I only checked Google's Dawn library, not Rust's wgpu), and the amount of code that's pulled into the project is massive. A well-made Metal renderer which only implements the needed features will easily be 100x smaller (in terms of linecount) and most likely faster.
WGPU is just a layer over the top of the native APIs on any given platform so unless Zed's DirectX/Metal renderers were particularly bad it's unlikely WGPU will be better here.
Please elaborate, I am curious to why would you think WebGPU would meaningfully beat their Metal/DirectX renderers.
> This definitely would be worth some profiling. I don't think it's a given that their custom stacks are going to beat wgpu in a meaningful way.
They probably will for memory usage. Current wgpu seems to have a floor around ~100mb that isn't there with other rendering backends (and it was more like ~60mb with wgpu a few months / versions ago).
Not sure if this is fixable in wgpu, or do with spec compatibility (my guess would be that it's fixable, just not top priority for the team atm).