Figma's engineering team replaced a decade-old Instance Updater architecture with a new reactive system called Materializer. The old system handled component instances in a self-contained but increasingly fragile way, causing cascading updates and editor lockups in large design system files. The new architecture introduces push-based dependency tracking, automatic invalidation, and a shared runtime orchestration layer that cleanly separates layout, variable evaluation, and instance resolution. Common operations like variable mode changes improved by 40–50% in large files. The framework is generic enough that other Figma features like rich text and slots are now built on top of it, accelerating future development. Rollout involved months of parallel validation across hundreds of thousands of production files to ensure correctness and performance parity.
Table of contents
Outgrowing our architectureChoosing radical changeIntroducing MaterializerCoordinating runtime systemsRolling out to millions of usersReturns on a new foundationSort: