For people like me who know little about Figma, what motivates their use of WebAssembly?
They started with the goal of photoshop in the browser.
Photopea is great and replaced my need for PS. I only do light weed editing though
Figma’s Journey to TypeScript
21–30 of 257 posts
Re: Figma’s Journey to TypeScript
#22[flagged]
Re: Figma’s Journey to TypeScript
#23> To complete an operation like `const [a, b] = function_that_returns_an_array()`, JavaScript constructs an iterator that iterates through the array instead of directly indexing from the array
This is interesting. Why doesn't JS just directly index arrays for destructuring?
Re: Figma’s Journey to TypeScript
#24Ah yes.. Switch to Typescript and give up all your advances to get a brand new set of crutches.
Can you elaborate what you consider "crutches" in this case?
Re: Figma’s Journey to TypeScript
#25For people like me who know little about Figma, what motivates their use of WebAssembly?
Vector editing has a lot of CPU bound tasks. Evan has some writing regarding the transition to WASM https://medium.com/figma-design/webassembly-cut-figmas-load-...
Re: Figma’s Journey to TypeScript
#26Surprising 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".
Weird and quirky things like custom languages are bad for your resume if you're just a user (e.g a dev who uses it) rather than the implementor. That means ambitious people will consider it to be a reason to leave. It also makes hiring harder and onboarding takes longer. You also have a big transformation project to do if you ever drop your custom language.
Sometimes it's worth it if the speed boost is huge, or if you can write safer code, or if you actually want to gatekeep hiring to people who like learning new languages.
Re: Figma’s Journey to TypeScript
#27[flagged]
Why don't you like it?
Personally, I don't like it either. Firstly - entirely irrationally - because I don't like Microsoft. I grew up with them acting incredibly hostile towards the open source community and the rest of the industry, and I find that hard to forget. I know that has nothing to do with the merits of TypeScript, but I can't say it's not there.
Secondly, I don't like the complexity incurred by any compile-to-JS language. For Figma I bet it's worth it, I bet they did their homework. But the amount of tiny projects I've seen that are an unreasonable maintenance burden because of all the packages and toolchains they use, it'd be funny if it wasn't sad.
I might still use TypeScript, but for me it's more of a "give me a reason to use it" than a "give me a reason not to use it" kind of situation.
Re: Figma’s Journey to TypeScript
#28Ah yes.. Switch to Typescript and give up all your advances to get a brand new set of crutches.
Can you elaborate what you consider "crutches" in this case?
They had a custom language giving them full flexibility to achieve making a product in the browser that put them ahead of everyone else, and instead of embracing that, they throw it out to be able to hire of the shelve developers to code in a language that doesn't let them move freely. Typescript is like crutches in the sense that it might support you in not falling, but you only really need them if you're crippled in some way.
Re: Figma’s Journey to TypeScript
#29> To complete an operation like `const [a, b] = function_that_returns_an_array()`, JavaScript constructs an iterator that iterates through the array instead of directly indexing from the array This is interesting. Why doesn't JS just directly index arrays for destructuring?
Because things like proxies exist, I guess.
Also, what's even more crazy is that destructuring {0: foo, 1: bar} can be faster in some javascript engines when destructuring an array with two or three element.
Re: Figma’s Journey to TypeScript
#30[flagged]
Why don't you like it? Personally, I don't like it either. Firstly - entirely irrationally - because I don't like Microsoft. I grew up with them acting incredibly hostile towards the open source community and the rest of the industry, and I find that hard to forget. I know that has nothing to do with the merits of TypeScript, but I can't say it's not there. Secondly, I don't like the complexity incurred by any compil…
I also hate microsoft. I worked with their piece of shit browser for 20 years. From ie3 onward they all sucked and lagged behind. Their OS was complete garbage and somehow they managed to penetrate like 90% of the desktop market.
but beyond that typescript i find is cognitive overload for someone who considers themselves an expert at vanilla javascript. It more than doubles the development time. I rarely use the inflections because 50% of the time it points to "any" so its utterly useless...and these kids who claim "but you won't get an undefined error!" is just well fix your fucking undefined error when you see it...is my response. WHy do I need to 3x my dev time and hurt my brain in the process so some jackass doesn't have to worry about an undefined variable.
I also think the reason MS released TS is because they were unable to find good devs who knew JS. ALl that typeshit in other languages (most enterprise crap like java and .net/c#) could now all be converted to ts devs without having to rehire. TS is for offshore teams imo.
That being said I will say on a team of 50+ devs on the same codebase I would vote for typescript becuase you will get a shit load of js spaghetti otherwise from these people who can't be bothered to understand js.