Hacker News Reader

Comment by sethhochberg | Hacker News Reader

Figma is one of my favorite examples of something which is a nontrivial webapp that avoid feeling like a webapp a lot of the time, even when running in a browser instead of their Electron wrapper.

But their technical leadership contains some of the (arguably) most accomplished folks working in the Javascript world these days, they might be an outlier in this area.

View on HN

Figma is built in Web-Assembly (compiled from C++) [1] and Canvas, basically sidestepping the vast majority of the web stack. That's why it's fast.

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

This exchange is absolutely hilarious to me. We've got people complaining about Google doing something while praising Figma for not being so foolish or evil and extolling them as being exceptionally clever. Except oops, turns out Figma is doing the same thing that is believed to be foolish or evil.

It turns out HN is prone to the same sort of knee jerk reactions as most every other "social news" site (even if to a lesser degree). Who would've thought?!

Neat, I had no idea it wasn't a normal old DOM application. Certainly does add a lot of validation to Google's approach here.

It’s easy to forget that Figma is a webapp, until you leave it running in the background and your $2000 computer grinds to a halt.

How is it on resource-usage though?

Another example: Google Docs seems ok on responsiveness, but not on efficiency (especially memory).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com