Bit-twiddling optimizations in Zed's Rope

I really like all the blog posts and videos the Zed team has put out, thank you if you’re reading this!

Unrelated to this specific post I’m such a fan of Zed. It’s the first feature complete text editor in recent memory that I’ve truly enjoyed using (i.e. it stays out of the way, is really fast, feels well engineered). I’m coming to Zed after years of Emacs which I still have love for but no longer feels like a competitive piece of software (it does not take full advantage of how good computers are today, e.g. gpu rendering or multicore). I really hope Zed stays a fast and lightweight text editor instead of becoming some bloated growth-at-all-cost VC ware (not that they’ve exhibited any signs of that happening). I’d also happily pay for Zed without a subscription based thing for access to LLM features (which I do not use).

> it does not take full advantage of how good computers are today, e.g. gpu rendering or multicore

Why does Emacs need that though? I hear people say this all the time and I don't get it. Multicore kind of works against the structure that Emacs touts as a feature. And GPU rendering? In many applications, I totally agree with these complaints. But it's a text editor.

I tried Zed myself, and it's good. But it doesn't dethrone Emacs (for me personally).

> But it's a text editor.

Long time emacs user here (+20 years, yikes). I've used it on all kinds of computers during this time. Even a relatively modest computer from 2024 is an absolute beast compared to something from the year 2000.

With that said, there are text editing operations that can cause it to grind to a complete halt, especially working with large files (or very long lines). And it shouldn't, you know? I think emacs users sort of internalize which operations they should avoid. It's kind of ridiculous to have to do that in a text editor with the massive amounts of compute that our computers have today.