macOS only, no wgpu
Going straight to Metal through objc2 costs about 10 crates instead of
about 200, and one build script instead of about 40. The price is that a
Linux or Windows port means writing a second backend from scratch. That
was a deliberate trade, not an oversight.
CoreText, not a Rust font stack
It ships with the OS, handles hinting and complex-script shaping better than anything we would write, and costs zero dependencies.
Our own rope
src/text/rope.rs is a persistent B-tree. Its API shape dictates undo,
multiple cursors, syntax-tree sync and eventual CRDT merging, so it is core
to the product. Rope::clone is O(1) and shares structure.
One draw call per frame
Every glyph is an instance of one quad. Drawing a screen of text is a
single drawPrimitives with no per-frame geometry work.
The dependency tree is 14 crates, one vendored build script, zero proc macros, and that build script has been read line by line.
tree-sitter is compiled from C checked into third_party/ with crc’s own
build.rs, rather than taken as a crate. The crate would have cost 29
crates, 10 build scripts and a proc macro, because serde_json is one of its
build dependencies.
Every dependency is pinned exactly (=x.y.z), and CI fails if a new build
script or any proc-macro crate enters the tree. The review of each one is in
the dependency review.
.http request files, environments, curl runner