[o1y32]

People bring up Figma in almost any discussion related to WebAssembly. I tried to dig into this and understand why they chose this, what kind of benefit they are getting from this and how it compares to alternatives. Turns out that there is no comparison in performance because the alternative (doing everything in JS) was never done, and the choice of going WebAssembly is more due to their history and stack than anything else. In other words, if they rewrote the whole thing with modern JavaScript ecosystem (e.g. TypeScript with strict typing, typed array), it is unclear that the product would be any worse than the current implementation, because nobody ever tried that.

Therefore, "Figma is built on WebAssembly so WebAssembly is good" is weak argument.

[matthewowen]

I work at Figma. Mostly not in that part of the codebase, but close enough to say that it would be worse if we did what you are describing.