This has been an exciting two week for StateLayer. After some initial features in newsletters, we had over a hundred developers from around the world visit the site. Seeing interest from the global community right away was an incredible and humbling experience.
But with that first wave of traffic came our first real-world performance data, and I saw something that was not acceptable. For some users, the initial load time for the editor was painfully high.
For any of our first visitors who experienced this, I am genuinely sorry. That is not the experience I want to provide, and I made it my top priority to fix it.
The Technical Deep Dive: The Problem
The culprit was not network speed, but CPU processing time on the user's device. In my initial build, I was importing the entire Babylon.js 3D engine all at once. This meant that before the page could render, the browser had to parse and execute a massive amount of JavaScript, including many advanced features the initial scene wasn't even using.
The Fix: Modular Imports & Tree-Shaking
The solution was to refactor the application to use modular imports. Instead of asking for the entire library at once, StateLayer now only requests the specific pieces of the engine that it needs for the initial render.
This allows the build tool to perform an optimization called "tree-shaking," where it intelligently removes unused code from the final bundle.
The Result
The result of this refactor is a dramatic improvement. The initial JavaScript parse and execution time has been reduced by over 80%, leading to a significantly faster and smoother loading experience for everyone, everywhere.
This is our commitment: StateLayer will be a world-class, high-performance tool. This first post-mortem is part of that commitment to transparency. Thank you for being a part of our journey—even the bumpy parts.