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by mojuba 57 days ago
Excellent post. I share the author's sentiment which is essentially "to hell with Figma, at least fix Sketch". Been feeling very lonely in may hatred towards Figma, which is for a whole bunch of reasons (among others, it's an incredibly shitty, memory and CPU hungry Electron app that looks and feels worse than any more or less well designed web site), but now after reading this I realize the number of reasons has doubled.
2 comments
dygd 57 days ago
It may look like a crappy Electron app, but Figma has a quite interesting architecture. The browser editor is developed in C++ and cross-compiled to JavaScript with emscripten. The rendering engine looks like its handling HTML, but it's actually rendering their own document format for cross-browser consistency. They have their own CRDT implementation to handle multi-user edits.

[0] https://www.madebyevan.com/figma/building-a-professional-des...

[1] https://www.madebyevan.com/figma/

[2] https://www.madebyevan.com/figma/how-figmas-multiplayer-tech...

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love2read 57 days ago
I think my biggest question is who cares? What does having an interesting internal architecture have to do with the “its electron though” ideological attack.
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brulard 57 days ago
It is made to perform much better than your typical electron app would. Saying electron-based == shitty is complete misunderstanding of the technology. Although i dislike Figma as much as the next guy, their app was in many ways very impressive. See Figma's cofounder old articles at https://madebyevan.com/figma/
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ghoulishly 57 days ago
(author of the post here) I cut a paragraph how Figma costs cuckoo bananas money for your entire team for the privilege of enduring this byzantine nightmare. And they paywall certain features, which you likely can't get authorization for, so you have to do more hacks on top of hacks on top of the “gold standard” practices I shared in the blog post. The price ramp is not gradual.
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democracy 57 days ago
I think this is what kills them, not AI. I know 2 companies (enterprise level) who are migrating away from Atlassian atm just gets too costly.
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cptcobalt 57 days ago
man, I dont even use Figma for personal & side projects because its so expensive. I still occasionally fire up sketch or freehand it.

Figma is a work tool only and I'm disappointed by its MCP tooling which feels late and behind where it should be, I just feel forced to use Figma Make which stays in their walled garden without practical utility and connections to my actual codebases

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