Dependencies

Notable third-party Rust crates Zed depends on. The full list is the workspace [dependencies] block in Cargo.toml. This page surfaces the ones that shape the architecture.

Async runtime

• smol — the async runtime GPUI builds on (foreground). Zed uses GPUI's executor as the primary runtime and bridges Tokio where necessary.
• tokio — used by HTTP clients, gRPC, LiveKit; bridged via crates/gpui_tokio.
• futures — combinators (used everywhere).

UI / rendering

• wgpu — cross-platform GPU backend used by crates/gpui_wgpu.
• cosmic-text — text shaping / layout (in some platforms).
• alacritty_terminal — terminal grid and parsing for crates/terminal.

Editor / parsing

• tree-sitter — incremental parser. Grammars are wrapped via crates/grammars and bundled per-language.

Serialization

• serde + serde_json — settings, keymaps, all JSON I/O.
• prost — protobuf code generation for crates/proto.
• toml — Cargo.toml parsing in build tools, plus extension manifests.

Networking

• reqwest (via crates/reqwest_client) — HTTP client.
• hyper — used internally by collab.
• tungstenite / tokio-tungstenite — WebSocket (in collab).

Cryptography

• ring — TLS / crypto primitives (via rustls).
• rustls — TLS transport.

Storage

• sqlx (Postgres) — collab backend ORM.
• rusqlite / sqlez (crates/sqlez) — local SQLite for client-side persistence.

Errors and logging

• anyhow — application errors.
• thiserror — typed library errors.
• log + project's crates/zlog — logging.
• sentry (in crates/crashes) — crash reporting.

Misc heavy hitters

• smallvec, arrayvec, compact_str — perf-oriented containers.
• parking_lot — faster mutexes.
• indexmap — order-preserving hashmap.
• uuid — IDs.
• unicode-segmentation — text boundaries.
• globset — search filters.
• tempfile — sandboxed temp paths in tests.
• walkdir — directory traversal in CLI and bundling.
• clap — CLI argument parsing.

License vetting

License compliance is enforced by cargo-about with rules in script/licenses/zed-licenses.toml. The CI workflow compliance_check.yml runs script/check-licenses. New deps may need an SPDX entry or a clarification.

The license tooling generates the bundled "Open-Source Software" page (crates/zed/contents/...) so users see attribution for everything shipped.