Every code editor promises to be fast. VS Code dominated for years by being "fast enough." Now Google's Antigravity claims to revolutionize coding with AI agents. But both share the same fundamental problem. They're built on Electron, a framework that wraps a web browser around a desktop app. This architecture has always been a compromise in terms of performance, but we’ve learned to live with the delays, the memory bloat, and that tiny lag between your keystrokes and the screen, because we never really had a better option. Zed changes that calculation. Built from scratch in Rust with GPU-accelerated rendering, it's the editor that makes you realize how sluggish everything else has become.

The Electron problem nobody talks about

It's a bigger problem than we think

VS Code and Antigravity are both Electron apps, which means they're essentially running a Chromium browser with your editor inside it. Every keystroke you type travels through multiple layers, and each step adds latency. This includes JavaScript event handlers, virtual DOM calculations, browser layout engine, repaint operations, and finally GPU compositing.

For years, this was acceptable because the convenience outweighed the cost. Web developers could build extensions using JavaScript, which created a massive ecosystem and added cross-platform support. But in 2026, codebases are larger than ever, and as more AI features get added to platforms like VS Code and Antigravity, we’re starting to see the impact of that delay. VS Code’s startup time already stretches when you load multiple extensions. Memory usage can climb well over a gigabyte on complex projects. Antigravity makes this worse. Built as a VS Code fork with embedded AI agents, it idles at over 1GB of RAM, and I have noticed severe slowdowns as chat history grows.

How Zed actually works

It uses Rust and a custom GPU

Zed doesn't try to optimize Electron. It abandons the entire web stack and rebuilds the editor from first principles using Rust and a custom GPU rendering framework called GPUI. The rendering approach is fundamentally different. Instead of treating the interface as a web page with DOM nodes that need layout calculations, Zed renders everything directly on the GPU like a video game, which means text becomes GPU textures, and the UI runs at 120 FPS, synchronized with high-refresh displays. When you scroll through a 10,000-line file, the CPU barely gets involved, and the GPU just translates the viewport.

Rust provides the second advantage. Unlike JavaScript, Rust doesn't use garbage collection. There are no unpredictable pauses where execution stops to reclaim memory. Performance stays deterministic, and because Rust provides strong thread-safety guarantees, Zed can aggressively parallelize work across CPU cores. Something like Syntax highlighting runs on background threads, while project-wide search uses SIMD instructions and multi-threading to scan code faster. This is even faster than ripgrep in some cases, and definitely faster than VS Code's search.

Zed uses CRDTs (Conflict-free Replicated Data Types) to represent text buffers. This lets you type while an AI streams code into the same file, and the editor merges operations mathematically without blocking. I’ve personally noticed a massive difference in speed when using Zed. Cold startup takes barely any time compared to VS Code. The same small project uses under 100MB of RAM in Zed, while VS Code easily crosses the 1GB mark. Opening a large codebase takes 10 to 15 seconds in VS Code, but Zed does it in just a few seconds, all while using a fraction of the memory.

The speed advantage manifests in ways that are hard to quantify but immediately obvious once you experience them. Opening a project feels instantaneous almost 100% of the time, and file navigation, search, and autocomplete all happen without perceptible delay. Plus, the UI never stutters or drops frames, even when background tasks are running.

VS Code's biggest advantage remains its ecosystem. For any obscure language or tool, there's an extension. That massive marketplace is why developers hesitate to switch, even when they acknowledge VS Code's performance issues. Zed can't run VS Code extensions directly because they're JavaScript/Node modules built for Electron's architecture. Instead, it introduced a new extension system based on WebAssembly. Extensions run in a sandbox and can't freeze the main thread, which protects Zed's performance guarantees.

Zed offers AI Integration without the bloat

Unlike many other IDEs

Both Zed and Antigravity integrate AI, but in fundamentally different ways that reflect their architectural philosophies. Zed introduced Zeta, an 8-billion parameter model based on Qwen2.5-Coder that's trained specifically for edit prediction. Instead of fill-in-the-middle autocomplete, it predicts rewrites of code blocks based on your cursor history. It uses speculative decoding to achieve extremely low latency, streaming predictions token-by-token without waiting for you to stop typing.

The interaction model keeps you in control. Hit Tab to accept a prediction, or Tab repeatedly to cycle through alternatives. The Assistant Panel is a fully editable text buffer where you can drag code in, edit the AI's memory, and refine prompts using the same Vim commands you use for code. It treats AI interaction as code manipulation rather than conversation.

Antigravity takes the opposite approach. It's built around autonomous agents powered by Gemini 3 Pro. You don't just ask for a line of code but assign entire tasks, such as "Refactor the authentication module to use OAuth2." The agent generates a plan, you review it, then the agent executes it by modifying files, running tests, and checking results in an embedded browser. The implementation here is definitely more useful and advanced, but that also leads to it consuming more resources and slowing you down.

Each agent spawns its own language server process, consuming RAM. Running multiple agents in parallel (which is the intended workflow) can really push memory usage. The "Agent Manager" interface adds another layer of Electron overhead on top of the already heavy base.