[rudi-c]

That's sad but sensical. Fun fact, Figma originally started as a fully C++ codebase, and Asm.js was key in proving that it would be possible to run a design tool in the browser. The switch to WebAssembly didn't happen until after there were paying customers, and provided nice improvements to load time (Asm.js is still JS which the bundle size is bigger and requires the code to be parsed into an AST, unlike WASM).

[0x457]

What's so sad about it? It was just a compilation target that made sense at one point in time. Its like being sad about i386-unknown-freebsd1 being dropped.

[rudi-c]

Yes, I don't mean that it affects the present. Only sad in a nostalgia sense.

[frumplestlatz]

What’s sad about that is we could have had a clean, native, desktop Figma application.

[rudi-c]

This is a lazy statement based on extremely vague handwaving about desktop v.s. web. It's not the 2010s anymore. Time to drop these generalities.

Users were migrating to us _from_ desktop applications. Collaboration was the key differentiator, but a less well known reason was that improved performance, including but not limited to the support of large design systems, was also a commonly cited reason among paying customers for migrating to Figma.

[MBCook]

Users still care.

Desktop or collaborative is a false dichotomy. Desktop or performance is too.

I get why you did what you did. It makes sense. But don’t think there aren’t people out here who HATE everything being shoved on the web with no desktop option.

No, electron and PWA don’t count.

[latexr]

I’m just one data point, but when I tried Figma (admittedly many many years ago), I didn’t find it particularly performant. I remember being intrigued by the concept of vector networks (was that the name?) but being in the browser made it such an awful experience to use and so unreliable to shortcuts that I promptly abandoned it and never looked back.

I never communicated this to the team, but I doubt I was alone. All that is not to knock you down, I just wanted to share that being a proper native desktop app does matter to some people for practical reasons other than performance, even if you’re not aware of it.

[braden-lk]

How dare you make a performant, accessible app that's easy to distribute, instead of spinning up a different eng. team to maintain a different codebase on a different deployment pipeline so 1% of your userbase can say it's a "real" desktop app instead of a silly "fake" desktop app. :P

Jokes aside, Figma's stack is super inspiring, and y'all's articles on sync engines heavily inspired my work on LegendKeeper. I appreciate the work you do!

[Me1000]

A native application that further locks users into some single platform? Or accept all the maintenance and development costs and burdens that keep the application one step behind Photoshop if they wanted to support multiple platforms?

[shepherdjerred]

They explicitly had the goal of being a web application. It was a product choice, not a technical choice.