It is not really needed, but this one is definitely here for the sake of announced commercial plans. Maybe it is faster than vscode, but it is still not fast enough like most of based terminal editors. I just made my benchmarks with 500MB of dev/urandom bytes to open on clean nvim and zed. Nvim opens it in 20 seconds while it takes 30 for zed, so I can say there is at least something inside the core engine which works 50% slower that of my champion's. Non of the landing page benchmarks at zed features a fair competition with really fast and great editors.
Editor's main purpose is to edit, and i don't think that stuffing anything else in the basic box without user asking for it is necessary. You can always pick a plugin if you need AI or collaboration or suddenly hundred species of messenger is not enough and it MUST be inside you editor instead of a usual swipe to an adjacent screen.
The performance we're talking about here is not startup time, but responsiveness to keystrokes. Fast startup should also be a goal, but this is primarily an editor for doing development work with, and for me at least those kind of editors stay open all day (or more) for each project I'm working on. I use a very lean vim configuration for other use cases.
Editor's main purpose is to edit, and i don't think that stuffing anything else in the basic box without user asking for it is necessary. You can always pick a plugin if you need AI or collaboration or suddenly hundred species of messenger is not enough and it MUST be inside you editor instead of a usual swipe to an adjacent screen.