We already do lots of rendering to cached images. It's not a panacea. It saves you from unnecessary recomputing. But many actions update the rendered state per-frame. Zooming is a great example. You can't cache it at every resolution.
Maybe there's a way and we didn't find it? We looked at every example we could find. There's a lot of canvas apps without WebGL. But they're all orders of magnitude behind the Figma benchmark. Everything not using WebGL felt noticeably less smooth.
And in our user testing, our texting editing is already past the valley :)
True, but you don't need everything at max resolution simultaneously, so you can update your caches according to the current zoom level and thus get infinite zooming if you want.
At a large zoom level, few things get into the viewport, so it shouldn't cause troubles. My guess is that the troublesome scenario is when you zoom out (so that lots of pages can get rendered simultaneously), not when you zoom in?
Do you have any plans to open source / license the core rendering engine. Seems very useful for rendering in other contexts like textures for animations.
We weren't planning on it. It's not very clean or transferrable. We really hacked it together. We'd have to do a ton of work to make it useful for anyone.
Maybe there's a way and we didn't find it? We looked at every example we could find. There's a lot of canvas apps without WebGL. But they're all orders of magnitude behind the Figma benchmark. Everything not using WebGL felt noticeably less smooth.
And in our user testing, our texting editing is already past the valley :)