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by jauntywundrkind 1040 days ago
It's an impressive app but I as the parent said, I'd expect JS would have worked just fine & let you do all the same things, at essentially the same speed.

The key differentiation, as the parent says, is using Web Workers to make sure you're not doing work on the main thread.
1 comments
karaterobot 1040 days ago
> I'd expect JS would have worked just fine & let you do all the same things, at essentially the same speed

I think you would be wrong about that. Certainly, it's not just WASM that makes Figma fast, but it's an important piece. Look at it this way: why would they have built out the product with WASM five years ago if Javascript was just as good for their use case? It's a huge investment in a new technology with relatively few people you can hire for it, versus quite possibly the most well-known, well-supported language in the world. They identified some significant advantage that made the cost-benefit analysis line up.

Normally, I don't like the argument that because somebody did it, it must be the right choice. But, Figma made so many correct decisions out of the gate that, in this case, I'd give them the benefit of the doubt.

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treis 1040 days ago
> They identified some significant advantage that made the cost-benefit analysis line up.

I don't know if this is true or not but I don't rate the fact that they used it as much evidence that they should have used it. IME decisions like this are because some early engineer wanted to use that particular bit of technology.

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afavour 1040 days ago
> They identified some significant advantage that made the cost-benefit analysis line up.

No doubt. But we don’t know what that advantage was. You could assume it was for performance related reasons. But maybe they wanted cross-platform compatibility, something WASM allows far more than JS. Or maybe they hired a load of developers experienced in making a graphic design tool rather than making a webapp and decided to use WASM to provide those developers with a more familiar environment.

Anyway, without knowing any of this it’s very difficult to say “Figma did it so we should too”.

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crabmusket 1039 days ago
Figma were already compiling C++ to asm.js, and then switched over to WASM.

https://www.figma.com/blog/webassembly-cut-figmas-load-time-...

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