> 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.

> 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).

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.

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.

Please elaborate, I am curious to why would you think WebGPU would meaningfully beat their Metal/DirectX renderers.