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Comment by pas | Hacker News Reader

My friend (ex-coworker) was involved in one about 1.5 years ago for a few months.

It was basically a one man startup and the argument to use Rust was because the guy wanted to use WASM on the frontend, because it was a mind mapping software (as far as I remember, and so information heavy, blablabla).

WASM might make sense or not, dunno. Figma somehow manages to be fast, I don't think they use WASM. (They are fast because of canvas, right?)

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Figma is a very heavy user of WASM. Was already in 2017: https://www.figma.com/blog/webassembly-cut-figmas-load-time-...

I think it'd be less about being info-heavy and more about needing to reimplement everything on top of a canvas anyway. Not saying it's impossible to implement a mindmap with html, but it's possible to want mindmap features that would be much easier to implement with canvas.

Rust becomes more viable the simpler the API between it and your JS is, and "takes events and renders pixels" is a very simple API.

> Figma somehow manages to be fast, I don't think they use WASM.

Figma not only uses wasm but pioneered it. They're consulted be standards bodies, they implemented wasm features in browsers, ...

> They are fast because of canvas

Are they? It is a small miracle it runs as well as it does on the browser, but if you compare it to Sketch it’s molasses.

Sketch the native app or Sketch browser app?

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