Snap! Programming Platform Evolves with Performance Gains and 3D Experiments

By a Staff Reporter

The visual programming language Snap!, a browser-based descendant of Scratch developed at the University of California, Berkeley, is demonstrating significant evolution on two fronts: foundational performance optimization and experimental feature expansion into three-dimensional graphics. These developments highlight the platform's dual identity as both a robust educational tool and a sandbox for advanced computational creativity.

Snap!6: A Leap in Efficiency and Scale

According to an official announcement on the Snap! Forum, the release of Snap!6 in July 2020 marked the platform's "biggest update... for years," with a core focus on scalability and performance. A collaborative team of UC Berkeley researchers, SAP engineers, and international educators undertook a substantial rewrite of the software's Morphic graphical kernel.

The technical overhaul yielded dramatic results. The forum announcement reports that large projects now load up to seven times faster, and the memory footprint for one particularly large application was reduced from 2 gigabytes to a mere 80 megabytes. This optimization not only improves the user experience for individuals, especially those on less powerful hardware, but also carries broader implications. The development team noted that by saving hardware resources across its user base of hundreds of thousands, the update has improved the platform's ecological impact through reduced energy consumption.

Furthermore, the execution speed of Snap!'s "WARP" mode, a feature for running projects at accelerated speeds, was reportedly doubled. These systemic improvements suggest a maturation of the platform, enabling it to handle more complex and ambitious projects from its diverse community of students, educators, and hobbyist programmers.

Community Pushes Boundaries with Experimental 3D

Parallel to these under-the-hood enhancements, the Snap! community is actively exploring new frontiers in graphical output. A separate forum post titled "So.. Snap! has 3D now" showcases a user-created project that implements a basic 3D environment. The project allows for movement and rotation using the WASD keys and includes a jump mechanic, demonstrating that the block-based language can be leveraged for real-time, interactive 3D scenes.

The creator notes this development was "only possible in the development version" of Snap! and expressed surprise at the direction, calling it "quite neat." The project also surfaced current limitations, such as the difficulty of applying color to 3D objects within the environment, hinting at both the experimental nature of the work and potential areas for future development. A performance analysis included in the post revealed that a significant portion of processing time was consumed by a single function related to canvas management, indicating the computational challenges inherent in adding 3D rendering to a primarily 2D-focused system.

A Platform Defined by Its Ecosystem

These technical narratives unfold within a vibrant online ecosystem. The primary Snap! Forum, as detailed in its category structure, serves as the central hub for this activity. It hosts over 2,300 shared projects, more than 600 help requests, 260 bug reports, and nearly 200 discussions specifically for teachers. Categories for tutorials, feature requests, and general computer science discussion round out a comprehensive support and collaboration network.

This structure facilitates the kind of bottom-up innovation seen in the 3D experiment, while also providing the feedback channel necessary for the top-down, performance-focused work of the core development team. The forum's "For Teachers" category, with 185 topics, underscores Snap!'s continued strong roots in educational contexts, even as its technical capabilities expand.

Implications and Future Trajectory

The simultaneous advancement of Snap! along these two paths—core optimization and experimental graphics—paints a picture of a dynamic open-source project. The performance gains of Snap!6 lower the barrier to entry and enable more reliable classroom use, solidifying its position in computer science education. Concurrently, the community's tinkering with 3D graphics explores the upper bounds of what is possible within a block-based paradigm, potentially attracting a new cohort of users interested in game development or advanced visualization.

This duality is a key strength. The platform maintains stability and accessibility for its primary educational audience while providing the flexible tools and an engaged community that empower users to push into unexpected territories. Whether 3D capabilities become a standardized feature or remain a niche community experiment, their existence demonstrates the creative potential unlocked by a powerful, efficient, and accessible visual programming environment. The evolution of Snap! suggests that tools for learning to code can also serve as legitimate platforms for sophisticated computational expression.

Sources: Information for this report was synthesized from official announcements and community project posts on the Snap! Forum hosted at the University of California, Berkeley. Performance metrics and details of the Snap!6 update are derived from the developer blog post "Snap!6 is here, and it's all about scale." Details on the experimental 3D environment are based on the community project showcase "So.. Snap! has 3D now." The structure and scale of the community are detailed in the public forum category listings.