Keeping Figma Fast: perf-testing the WASM editor

#1

Post by imslavko » Wed, Aug 30, 2023, 4:01 PM UTC

Keeping Figma Fast: perf-testing the WASM editor
figma.com

Re: Keeping Figma Fast: perf-testing the WASM editor

#2

Post by yeldarb » Wed, Aug 30, 2023, 6:22 PM UTC

Nice post. Figma's engineering blog looks great; right up there with Airbnb's and Etsy's which I also enjoy.

Re: Keeping Figma Fast: perf-testing the WASM editor

#3

Post by titzer » Wed, Aug 30, 2023, 6:28 PM UTC

Really awesome work! If the authors happen to drop by, I'd be curious if some of the work in their pipeline might be able to help for other types of GUI applications with Wasm. I'm also very curious to see what role, if any the Wasm engine's performance plays in the overall story, and be able to distill out any key workloads that can help Wasm engines improve.

Re: Keeping Figma Fast: perf-testing the WASM editor

#4

Post by drewda » Wed, Aug 30, 2023, 7:21 PM UTC

Occasionally I wonder what could have happened to front-end web application development over the past few years if Figma had open-sourced their WebGL-based GUI library.

We've had ~15 years of focus on the DOM with the progression of jQuery to Backbone to Vue, and many other libraries. At least what I've heard of the Figma approach almost sounds like the Adobe Flash/Flex runtime.

That might only make sense for applications with high levels of information density and snappy reactivity requirements like Figma or Google Docs or a web map -- not for content-focused websites. Still, it's interesting to wonder if our arguments would be more interesting these days if we were discussing those types of approaches, rather than just fighting about React vs. Svelte, or this JavaScript module loader vs. that one...

Re: Keeping Figma Fast: perf-testing the WASM editor

#5

Post by fidotron » Wed, Aug 30, 2023, 7:35 PM UTC

drewda wrote: post #4

Occasionally I wonder what could have happened to front-end web application development over the past few years if Figma had open-sourced their WebGL-based GUI library. We've had ~15 years of focus on the DOM with the progression of jQuery to Backbone to Vue, and many other libraries. At least what I've heard of the Figma approach almost sounds like the Adobe Flash/Flex runtime. That might only make sense for applica…

Figma definitely had a killer advantage with Evan Wallace around. He might be known now for esbuild but he is a WebGL demon of epic proportion.

Re: Keeping Figma Fast: perf-testing the WASM editor

#6

Post by maccamey » Wed, Aug 30, 2023, 7:44 PM UTC

drewda wrote: post #4

Occasionally I wonder what could have happened to front-end web application development over the past few years if Figma had open-sourced their WebGL-based GUI library. We've had ~15 years of focus on the DOM with the progression of jQuery to Backbone to Vue, and many other libraries. At least what I've heard of the Figma approach almost sounds like the Adobe Flash/Flex runtime. That might only make sense for applica…

Couldn’t agree more. Would love more discussion of stuff like this in front end

Re: Keeping Figma Fast: perf-testing the WASM editor

#7

Post by andy_ppp » Wed, Aug 30, 2023, 7:49 PM UTC

drewda wrote: post #4

Occasionally I wonder what could have happened to front-end web application development over the past few years if Figma had open-sourced their WebGL-based GUI library. We've had ~15 years of focus on the DOM with the progression of jQuery to Backbone to Vue, and many other libraries. At least what I've heard of the Figma approach almost sounds like the Adobe Flash/Flex runtime. That might only make sense for applica…

Could someone compile Skia to WASM and add a layer for some UI niceties like flexbox? I wonder what the layer they have consists of.

Re: Keeping Figma Fast: perf-testing the WASM editor

#8

Post by inssein » Wed, Aug 30, 2023, 7:59 PM UTC

fidotron wrote: post #5

drewda wrote: post #4

Occasionally I wonder what could have happened to front-end web application development over the past few years if Figma had open-sourced their WebGL-based GUI library. We've had ~15 years of focus on the DOM with the progression of jQuery to Backbone to Vue, and many other libraries. At least what I've heard of the Figma approach almost sounds like the Adobe Flash/Flex runtime. That might only make sense for applica…

Figma definitely had a killer advantage with Evan Wallace around. He might be known now for esbuild but he is a WebGL demon of epic proportion.

Woah I had never connected the dots - I had used https://github.com/evanw/glfx.js for a realtime photo editor and then wrote https://github.com/inssein/jsfx to render the same without WebGL for printing.

Re: Keeping Figma Fast: perf-testing the WASM editor

#9

Post by bsder » Wed, Aug 30, 2023, 8:02 PM UTC

drewda wrote: post #4

Occasionally I wonder what could have happened to front-end web application development over the past few years if Figma had open-sourced their WebGL-based GUI library. We've had ~15 years of focus on the DOM with the progression of jQuery to Backbone to Vue, and many other libraries. At least what I've heard of the Figma approach almost sounds like the Adobe Flash/Flex runtime. That might only make sense for applica…

Figma was considered ... good?

Every time I have used it, it feels incredibly laggy with a crapton of useless animations.

Maybe it's better on Windows?

Re: Keeping Figma Fast: perf-testing the WASM editor

#10

Post by yellow_lead » Wed, Aug 30, 2023, 8:07 PM UTC

Seeing a 20% margin of error for some of their tests (due to VMs, noisy neighbors), makes me curious how others solve this problem. Dedicated hardware seems like a good investment, otherwise you need to constantly overcompensate with multiple runs.