Improve texture loading
One of the major bottlenecks in initial startup performance is the loading of all textures. These textures are mostly PNG images loaded via stb. That's not extremely fast if you look at comparisons online. Obviously we could address this issue by loading the textures via multiple threads or potentially in an asynchronous way. However I think we should first make sure there isn't an easier solution to apply.
So this is what I found which could improve loading speed quite a bit:
Here is a mirror of the release only provided as a single source file (this would make sense to use as git submodule):
One example how to use it for loading images can be found here: