Hats off to you on the implementation and for being so technically ambitious.
I'm wondering why you exactly decided to go this route? I was expecting your app to be very graphically intensive or have some other kind of demanding requirements. When I went to the site it appears it's some kind of collaborative design tool? Not saying these tools don't require a top-notch UI. Maybe for manipulating and scrolling/scaling huge canvases? Coming from a mapping background, I can totally see this as something lacking in the browser. There aren't many primitives for creating these kinds of image-based interfaces.
There's certainly a trade-off between having super-fast performance and a completely custom rendering engine and adopting a not-often used delivery mechanism and stack (C++/asm.js). I'd imagine it's hard to find people who have all that expertise, it's hard enough finding a good frontend dev in the conventional technologies of the web.
Good luck on your product launch, can't wait to use your UI and play around with it.
People normally associate WebGL with 3D game content, but it's for 2D too! I decided to build our own GPU rendering pipeline for the performance and document size benefits you mentioned and also so we can guarantee top-quality, consistent rendering across platforms. A GPU rendering pipeline is actually a pretty normal technology choice for a cross-platform desktop app. It hasn't been too hard to find people with that expertise to work on the editor. We're looking at people with game development or browser development backgrounds.
I'm wondering why you exactly decided to go this route? I was expecting your app to be very graphically intensive or have some other kind of demanding requirements. When I went to the site it appears it's some kind of collaborative design tool? Not saying these tools don't require a top-notch UI. Maybe for manipulating and scrolling/scaling huge canvases? Coming from a mapping background, I can totally see this as something lacking in the browser. There aren't many primitives for creating these kinds of image-based interfaces.
There's certainly a trade-off between having super-fast performance and a completely custom rendering engine and adopting a not-often used delivery mechanism and stack (C++/asm.js). I'd imagine it's hard to find people who have all that expertise, it's hard enough finding a good frontend dev in the conventional technologies of the web.
Good luck on your product launch, can't wait to use your UI and play around with it.