Why Use Feather?
Feather is a great choice if one or more of the following is true:
- You can compute the configuration of those instances from some underlying state.
- There are 100s, 1000s or 10,000s of instances to manage.
- Memory efficiency is an important constraint.
- Not every instance in the tree needs to be updated every update.†
† This isn't because feather is too slow when every instance must be updated. Rather, you begin to hit a bottleneck in the Roblox Engine. For example, it just isn't possible to change the cframe of many thousands of parts every single frame without affecting performance, even with WorldRoot:BulkMoveTo(). This will depend on what instances you are using, and what properties you are setting.
Feather was specifically designed for use with metaboard (it still uses Roact right now), to draw path-curves with parts. Each board can consist of 10-20,000 parts, and the contents of the board is a function of the curve data + recent edits (like erasing). The board gets updated as it is being written on, and almost none of the existing curves are affected by these updates, so this can be detected with a Feather component to only trigger the necessary updates.