In 2009, I joined Mozilla and started working on the Bespin[1] project, which Ben Galbraith & Dion Almaer had brought to Moz. Bespin was built with a canvas-based renderer. Bespin was way faster than other browser-based code editors at the time.
Then the Ajax.org/Cloud9 folks came along with their Ace editor[2], which was DOM-based and still very fast. We ended up merging the projects. edit to add: and switching to DOM rendering
Rik Arends[3] was one of the Ajax.org folks and he's been working on a WebGL-based code environment called Makepad[4], which is entirely built in Rust and has its own UI toolkit. He's complained a lot about how difficult it is to make a performant JS-based editing environment.
My point in all of this is just that there are absolutely tradeoffs in performance, accessibility, ease-of-development, internationalization, and likely other aspects. If raw performance is what you're going for, it's hard to beat just drawing on a canvas or using WebGL. Google Docs needs to worry about all of that other stuff, too, so I'll be interested to see how this shapes up.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Skywriter
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ace_(editor)
[3]: https://twitter.com/rikarends
[4]: https://makepad.dev
Then the Ajax.org/Cloud9 folks came along with their Ace editor[2], which was DOM-based and still very fast. We ended up merging the projects. edit to add: and switching to DOM rendering
Rik Arends[3] was one of the Ajax.org folks and he's been working on a WebGL-based code environment called Makepad[4], which is entirely built in Rust and has its own UI toolkit. He's complained a lot about how difficult it is to make a performant JS-based editing environment.
My point in all of this is just that there are absolutely tradeoffs in performance, accessibility, ease-of-development, internationalization, and likely other aspects. If raw performance is what you're going for, it's hard to beat just drawing on a canvas or using WebGL. Google Docs needs to worry about all of that other stuff, too, so I'll be interested to see how this shapes up.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Skywriter
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ace_(editor)
[3]: https://twitter.com/rikarends
[4]: https://makepad.dev