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Figma’s Journey to TypeScript

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Re: Figma’s Journey to TypeScript

#51

Post by arnorhs »

makeitdouble wrote: post #7
resonious wrote: post #2

Surprising 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…

That is an impressive misrepresentation of history.

PHP and its community were dying by the time FB used it. People here on HN kept talking php down.

In 2014 FB made their own flavour of php with a bunch of perf features, called hack.

Eventually a lot of the perf features hack made its way into php.

FB is still on its own flavour. Php community is still dying.

Re: Figma’s Journey to TypeScript

#52

Post by Drakim »

dfgdfg34545456 wrote: post #40
mirekrusin wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's not paint pet projects black. Most things we're using today were somebody's pet projects including linux, llvm/clang, swift etc.

>Let's not paint pet projects black. I don't follow. Where did I do this?

> It does smell like someone's pet project.

"Smell" has negative connotations in English. If you say that "this code smells" it means it's bad, and likewise it's very easy to read your "It does smell like" as you meaning it's a bad thing.

Re: Figma’s Journey to TypeScript

#53

Post by 59nadir »

arnorhs wrote: post #51
makeitdouble wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That is an impressive misrepresentation of history. PHP and its community were dying by the time FB used it. People here on HN kept talking php down. In 2014 FB made their own flavour of php with a bunch of perf features, called hack. Eventually a lot of the perf features hack made its way into php. FB is still on its own flavour. Php community is still dying.

Meh, as far as I can see PHP has a ton of very active development around web services and frameworks, which is its core value proposition. PHP as a language should probably slow down in general but the people who use it don't seem to be really dying out or slowing down as much as the bubble leads us to believe.

Re: Figma’s Journey to TypeScript

#54

Post by dfgdfg34545456 »

Drakim wrote: post #52
dfgdfg34545456 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Let's not paint pet projects black. I don't follow. Where did I do this?

> It does smell like someone's pet project. "Smell" has negative connotations in English. If you say that "this code smells" it means it's bad, and likewise it's very easy to read your "It does smell like" as you meaning it's a bad thing.

Thank you for the English lesson, but it's a big leap from this supposed connotation to "painting pet projects black".

Re: Figma’s Journey to TypeScript

#55

Post by 59nadir »

jeswin wrote: post #18
metadata wrote: post #5

Skew 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.

> According to Evan Wallace (former Figma CTO), it was 1.5x to 2x faster due to better optimizations enabled by stricter type system. It's probably not as simple as that. If hotpaths are optimized, the 2x advantage is quite likely to vanish. But then one could say - well, you're forced to write optimized JS in several places and that impacts readability. Sure, but the trade off was to use an entirely new compile-to-j…

> It seems now that it wasn't worth it.

While I'm not going to debate this particular instance, I would caution against assuming all moves (with or without blog posts written about them) are indeed the best and wisest moves that could be made given the situation.

It's incredibly hard to look at our industry at large and declare that teams/companies are doing the best thing they can at any given point (where "best" is defined here as the most prudent thing, all things considered).

Re: Figma’s Journey to TypeScript

#56

Post by rikroots »

cranberryturkey wrote: post #22

[flagged]

I don't like Typescript because it forces me to think about types and data structures and stuff. Which is a Good Thing because I absolutely have to think about that stuff when working on large codebases with a team of colleagues: without the inline documentation and text editor help TS gives me when working on those codebases I'd be (at least!) 10x slower when refactoring old code or adding new code. And nobody wants to pay a slow developer!

However ... the one place I refuse to use Typescript is in my side project - a JS canvas library. I can justify this because: 1. it's a big codebase, but I know every line of it intimately having spent the last 10 years (re-)writing it; 2. nobody else contributes (and I kinda like it that way); and 3. I keep a close eye on competing canvas libraries and I've watched several of them go through the immense (frustrating!) work of converting their codebases to TS over the past few years and, seriously, I don't need that pain in my not-paid-for life.

Even so, I do maintain a .d.ts file for the library's 'API' (the functions devs would use when building a canvas using my library) because the testing, documentation and autocompletion help it offers is too useful to ignore. It is additional work, but it's just one file[1] and I can live with that.

[1] https://github.com/KaliedaRik/Scrawl-canvas/blob/v8/source/s...

Re: Figma’s Journey to TypeScript

#57

Post by goeiedaggoeie »

fhd2 wrote: post #38
gregplaysguitar wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> supports but ignores type annotations That’s how TS works too though - compilation just strips the types via babel etc, with type checking a separate process. You opt in file by file by switching .js to .ts

Well, the nice thing with Python types is that the _only_ difference to untyped Python is the type annotations. Last time I worked with TypeScript (two and a half years ago), it felt more like a different language _similar_ to JS. In my experience it was quite... viral. With MyPy I've genuinely seen just specific parts of a code base become typed and didn't notice any friction. I wonder what would happen if that prop…

Closure team have also deprecated a lot of the old tooling. Closue was ahead of it's time for sure and as someone who heavily used the Closure Library and Closure compiler in advanced mode, it is sad that it did not catch on. However using TSickle you can transpile Typescript into javascript which closure compiler uses for advanced optimisations.

Re: Figma’s Journey to TypeScript

#58

Post by some_furry »

arnorhs wrote: post #51
makeitdouble wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That is an impressive misrepresentation of history. PHP and its community were dying by the time FB used it. People here on HN kept talking php down. In 2014 FB made their own flavour of php with a bunch of perf features, called hack. Eventually a lot of the perf features hack made its way into php. FB is still on its own flavour. Php community is still dying.

> PHP and its community were dying by the time FB used it.

> Php community is still dying.

https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/php/

https://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/programming_langua...

Yeah I dunno about that one.

Re: Figma’s Journey to TypeScript

#59

Post by flohofwoe »

BananasFritas69 wrote: post #49
codeflo wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You probably know that Figma is a UX design software. This means it’s basically a graphics program: you draw shapes, you scroll and zoom around. It does that extremely well. It’s unbelievably snappy even on a very large canvas with many complex UI screens. Very few desktop applications run nearly as well these days. I’m convinced that this kind of optimization is an important part of their success.

unbelievably snappy until you build something complex with complex components that have a lot of hidden variants, exponentially scales the number of existing layers and it goes dogshit with <10 fps, lag, and screen freezes (even on apple chip)

That sounds more like a "Doc, it hurts when I do this" problem though.

Re: Figma’s Journey to TypeScript

#60

Post by mindfulmark »

It’s interesting to read comment threads of people that are dead set against Typescript. It’s a tool that has very few downsides and that improves nearly every single line of code you write. Either they’re scared to learn something new, not willing to take the time, or misunderstanding how useful it is. For anyone reading these comments and agreeing with Typescript naysayers, I would think more about why the commenter and yourself feel that way. You’re putting yourself at a big disadvantage.
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