A Tour of the C++ Engine which Powers That Design MMO Called Figma
summary
Figma’s client runs a C++ renderer and scene graph that emit WebGL commands and target WASM to hit 60 fps; an actual customer file with one million layers forced emergency fixes that recovered 50% memory by ignoring invisible instances. Ongoing fixes include deduplication, columnar storage for rare fields, an image LOD system, and a safe generational pointer plus custom allocator that prevents memory-safety corruption and speeds layer allocation by an order of magnitude while enabling daily browser deploys.
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chapters (10)
- 0:00Introduction
- 2:15“What do you like about working on Figma?”
- 4:19Employee diversity + workplace safety
- 5:55Game console hardware vs. web browsers
- 7:08How Figma runs like a game in the browser
- 9:04Constraints within the browser
- 11:44Optimization efforts for long term solutions
- 16:34Minimizing updates for users
- 17:33Figma’s engineering culture
- 19:19Closing
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