I've been experimenting with the STL conversion process - using the online conversion tool here: https://github.com/raviriley/STL-to-OpenSCAD-Converter. The output is an array of points which is fed to polygon in a module. If you have a monolithic piece of code which includes the array points, what you have is an OpenSCAD file which is impossible to edit, even a small object has far too many points to be editable. However, if you create a small 'wrapper' OpenSCAD file which uses <the intermediate file.scad>. Then invoke the module name from the wrapper, e.g. object1 (); the array is never loaded into OpenSCAD but is fed to the rendering engine.  This speeds up the handling of the STL object considerably. I have an ancient 8 year old quad core i5 laptop with a mere 12GB of physical RAM, running Ubuntu LTS 20.04, so its not the fastest.  What I have done is given it 20GB of swap. My slowest F6 render takes 45 minutes on a bad day and creates a 37MB stl, which takes 50 hours to print from a 98MB gcode, what kills the machine is Vivaldi, not OpenSCAD..  When I had access to a new Windows 10 laptop with 32GB RAM and an 8 core i7 with 512GB SSD, the Ubuntu machine was still faster when rendering. HTH Roger