> Our vision for the future of design tools is one where both the tool and the content are easily available to anyone, anywhere
> The reason this is hard is because the web wasn’t designed as a general-purpose computing platform.
> We fully control memory layout and can use compact 32-bit floats or even bytes when appropriate instead of JavaScript’s 64-bit doubles...The generated code is completely in control of allocation, which makes it much easier to hit 60fps by avoiding GC pauses. All C++ objects are just reserved ranges in a pre-allocated typed array so the JavaScript GC is never involved.
> One big issue for us was that certain browser configurations couldn’t allocate large ranges of continuous address space for the huge typed array that contains the entire emscripten memory space. The worst case was 32-bit Chrome on Windows which sometimes couldn’t even allocate a 256mb typed array because ASLR was fragmenting the address space. This has since been fixed.
A great example of making a single bold architectural decision (building a design tool on the web instead of as an app) in service of a vision (prioritize live collaboration), and then thoughtfully resolving all of the performance tradeoffs that stem from this route.
> Our vision for the future of design tools is one where both the tool and the content are easily available to anyone, anywhere
> The reason this is hard is because the web wasn’t designed as a general-purpose computing platform.
> We fully control memory layout and can use compact 32-bit floats or even bytes when appropriate instead of JavaScript’s 64-bit doubles...The generated code is completely in control of allocation, which makes it much easier to hit 60fps by avoiding GC pauses. All C++ objects are just reserved ranges in a pre-allocated typed array so the JavaScript GC is never involved.
> One big issue for us was that certain browser configurations couldn’t allocate large ranges of continuous address space for the huge typed array that contains the entire emscripten memory space. The worst case was 32-bit Chrome on Windows which sometimes couldn’t even allocate a 256mb typed array because ASLR was fragmenting the address space. This has since been fixed.
A great example of making a single bold architectural decision (building a design tool on the web instead of as an app) in service of a vision (prioritize live collaboration), and then thoughtfully resolving all of the performance tradeoffs that stem from this route.