Figma’s Journey to TypeScript
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Figma’s Journey to TypeScript
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Re: Figma’s Journey to TypeScript
#2Surprising to hear Figma had a custom language for JS. Even more surprising that it was faster than TS. And then they migrate off it onto slower TS!
Seems to happen a lot though. Company makes custom stuff early on, gets big, then migrates to something "standard".
Re: Figma’s Journey to TypeScript
#3Surprising to hear Figma had a custom language for JS. Even more surprising that it was faster than TS. And then they migrate off it onto slower TS! Seems to happen a lot though. Company makes custom stuff early on, gets big, then migrates to something "standard".
Often because the "standard" thing was not always the standard.
Like, all those people that chose Flow now have something "non-standard."
Re: Figma’s Journey to TypeScript
#4Surprising to hear Figma had a custom language for JS. Even more surprising that it was faster than TS. And then they migrate off it onto slower TS! Seems to happen a lot though. Company makes custom stuff early on, gets big, then migrates to something "standard".
Faster than TS for a narrow use-set is a fairly low bar. But as you scale it's a bar you have to measure against the available talent from the market. You've got to weigh the cost of a developer who can pick up a completely new framework sight unseen versus the weight of a developer who has documented experience in a platform or technology you're already using. If you go full custom development you can get incredible performance out of literally any language and framework out there. But as your project needs to handle more and more scenarios, the number of developers needed to maintain it reaches a point where you're better off with Off The Shelf software despite it being slower and not specifically suited to your needs.
If you can maintain your Unicorn hiring criteria long term, maybe fully custom stacks are maintainable. For most organizations, they need to move to something that the average hire can maintain going forward. That means big name boring software vendors for the most part.
Re: Figma’s Journey to TypeScript
#5Skew wasn't just a little bit faster than TypeScript.
According to Evan Wallace (former Figma CTO), it was 1.5x to 2x faster due to better optimizations enabled by stricter type system.
Re: Figma’s Journey to TypeScript
#6Surprising to hear Figma had a custom language for JS. Even more surprising that it was faster than TS. And then they migrate off it onto slower TS! Seems to happen a lot though. Company makes custom stuff early on, gets big, then migrates to something "standard".
Often because the "standard" thing was not always the standard. Like, all those people that chose Flow now have something "non-standard."
Coffeescript used to be "standard" in Ruby on Rails community.
(insert canned laughter)
Re: Figma’s Journey to TypeScript
#7Surprising to hear Figma had a custom language for JS. Even more surprising that it was faster than TS. And then they migrate off it onto slower TS! Seems to happen a lot though. Company makes custom stuff early on, gets big, then migrates to something "standard".
It happened in the PHP community as well, facebook being the poster child, but Yahoo also had a fair number of internal optimizations and I saw a few other companies tweak their way to get better perf/security.
Then comes a point where the community catches on and has bigger momentum than the company, so it makes sense to move to the standard implementation.
I'd kinda see Google's Borg -> k8s move as slightly similar, though they're the one inviting the community around the standard they built themselves.
Re: Figma’s Journey to TypeScript
#8Ah yes.. Switch to Typescript and give up all your advances to get a brand new set of crutches.
Re: Figma’s Journey to TypeScript
#9Skew wasn't just a little bit faster than TypeScript. According to Evan Wallace (former Figma CTO), it was 1.5x to 2x faster due to better optimizations enabled by stricter type system.
I really wish browsers had continued to develop a "use strong" mode for JS. It sounded like there were significant challenges, but curbing some dynamism in order for more predictable optimisation sounds like a great tradeoffs for production-quality apps.
Re: Figma’s Journey to TypeScript
#10Surprising to hear Figma had a custom language for JS. Even more surprising that it was faster than TS. And then they migrate off it onto slower TS! Seems to happen a lot though. Company makes custom stuff early on, gets big, then migrates to something "standard".
Why? Because Evan Wallace is gone. That’s my wild guess.