»Schedule // Talk
Thursday, October 9, 2025
17:45–18:30
Main Stage

Rendering at 1 million pixels / millisecond with GPUI

Modern computers are *fast*, but modern software rarely pushes it to its limits. We'll talk about Zed's graphics framework (GPUI) and how it enables you to build a cross-platform application, in Rust, that can render a new frame to the entire screen every 8ms. The programming model is similar to React, where UI is expressed as a declarative tree, but instead of clunking along in Javascript, it's powered by a blazingly fast rendering pipeline built from scratch in Rust.

Speaker

Conrad Irwin

Conrad Irwin is a life-long technologist. He creates delightful tools to help people be more productive.

Conrad is currently working on Zed, a next-generation code editor designed for high-performance collaboration with humans and AI. As a large Rust open-source project, Zed is a perfect balance between solving technical challenges and implementing the infinite roadmap required to build a revolutionary IDE.

Previously he was co-founder and CTO of Superhuman, the fastest email experience in the world. He was recognized by Forbes 30 under 30 for his work building the technology and team that got users get through their inboxes twice as fast.

Conrad is a firm believer in open source. He has contributed fixes to various projects, from libxml2 to sqlite, from git to Firefox. He believes in a culture of knowledge sharing and collaborative improvement in the tech community.

Fixer of bugs, filer of issues. It has been 'attempted to subtract with overflow' days since last incident.

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