I wonder if it would be possible to have gone directly to Zed, without going through Atom first (likewise, Plan 9 would never have been the first iteration of a Unix-like OS). "Rewrite it in Rust" makes a lot of sense if you have a working system that you want to rewrite, but maybe there's a reason that "rewrite it in Rust" is a meme and "write it in Rust" isn't. If you just want to move fast, put things up on the screen for people to interact with, and figure out how you want your system to work, dynamic languages with bytecode VMs and GC will get you there faster and will enable more people to contribute. Once the idea has matured, you can replace the inefficient implementation with one that is 10% of the size and 10x the speed. Adding lots of features and then pruning out the ones that turn out to be useless may also be easier than guessing the exact right feature set a priori.