I Built a 10 MB GPU-Accelerated Terminal in Rust + Metal

A few days ago, I released Metalterm, a new native terminal emulator for macOS built with Rust and Metal.

https://metalterm.dev/

Yes, another terminal emulator.

But I wanted to see how far I could push a terminal if I treated rendering performance, latency, memory usage, and smoothness as first-class features rather than implementation details.

The result is a native macOS app that's currently around 10 MB, uses a custom Metal renderer, and spends roughly 0.22 ms of GPU time per frame.

I Built a 10 MB GPU-Accelerated Terminal in Rust + Metal

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