> We wanted users to be able to see all their content on one screen> with many thousands of nodes on the screen
Does it really need WebGL? You could pre-render things to images (memoize your rendering basically) and update the cached images only when the editing happens. As the interactive editing usually happens only locally, it could probably work well.
The obvious upside is that you don't need then to re-invent the browser's renderer and text editing from scratch, you could re-use it.
For example, this stroke me as an extreme NIH:
> We also can’t use the browser’s built-in text editor, so we made one ourselves
People usually just hate custom non-system text inputs, because it is very hard to reproduce the native look and feel of text selection, editing and stuff, and even if you manage to get close to it, there will always be some "uncanny valley" effect...
Does it really need WebGL? You could pre-render things to images (memoize your rendering basically) and update the cached images only when the editing happens. As the interactive editing usually happens only locally, it could probably work well.
The obvious upside is that you don't need then to re-invent the browser's renderer and text editing from scratch, you could re-use it.
For example, this stroke me as an extreme NIH:
> We also can’t use the browser’s built-in text editor, so we made one ourselves
People usually just hate custom non-system text inputs, because it is very hard to reproduce the native look and feel of text selection, editing and stuff, and even if you manage to get close to it, there will always be some "uncanny valley" effect...