Live data from Hacker News

Figma’s Journey to TypeScript

figma.com

121–130 of 257 posts

Re: Figma’s Journey to TypeScript

#121
post #85

Off topic: Does anyone know of any sites made with Figma so I can see what the UX is like? As a user I don't care about DX if the resulting UX is bad.

Most large sites you see are made "with Figma". Designers use Figma for mocks and hand it off to web developers to implement.

Re: Figma’s Journey to TypeScript

#122

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 commente…

I don't think anti-TS people are 'scared to learn something new'. I'm sure most of those people write TS on a daily basis, because it's an industry standard right now.

Re: Figma’s Journey to TypeScript

#123
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? Because Evan Wallace is gone. That’s my wild guess.

It does smell like someone's pet project. I'm wondering what the folk at Microsoft had not figured out, that they indeed had at Figma. Typescript is open source, so why wasn't this optimisation just made as a contribution to Typescript at the time? Also, was Typescript really as claimed in its "infancy" at the time mentioned in the article? They didn't mention a particular year.

With enough investment, a pet project can become a mature platform.

Re: Figma’s Journey to TypeScript

#124

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…

I don't think Google uses K8s internally. Borg is still here though.

Re: Figma’s Journey to TypeScript

#125
post #85

Off topic: Does anyone know of any sites made with Figma so I can see what the UX is like? As a user I don't care about DX if the resulting UX is bad.

Basically every significant app you interface with is designed with Figma at this point.

Figma itself has no opinion about the resulting UX. It's a tool for designers, and they can design great UX, horrible UX, and everything in between.

Your question is kind of like saying "I want to see a house built with a hammer, to see if a hammer makes nice looking houses".

Re: Figma’s Journey to TypeScript

#126
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is actually a fairly indicative story. At the start there is a brilliant individual (Evan) who sets up an entire toolchain + core of the product. They then move on (or get pushed out, or get bored), and with the team (and the product) now being much bigger, things get replatformed to a more familiar, widely used stack. The success of these steps heavily depends on how robust the eng culture is at the organisation.…

It's ironic. For the past 5 years I've been writing type strict PHP. People love to shit on PHP yet I found that when I started using strict types my code quality improved, amount of lines needed to produce a result decreased, and necessary unit tests to produce the same result also decreased. Then a few months ago I decided to write a TS project from scratch. For the record I have 18 years of JavaScript experience.…

Thank you. The replies to your post all seem variants of “you should’ve used X instead of Y”, but when you’re transpiling, you’re inviting a world of subtle bugs and edge cases. The added value, if it at all exists, is almost never worth the trouble, IMO.

Re: Figma’s Journey to TypeScript

#129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or just go straight to esbuild. I've found vite just makes things more complicated and slower. Particularly, the "smart reloading" breaks in subtle ways and turning every source file into a request doesn't scale well. This can probably be configured away somehow, but again, that just makes things more complicated.

Remix. Vite done right, mostly pre-configured out of the box.

If you want to spend a minute or two waiting before your server is back up after making any kind of change, Remix sounds about right.

My project is relatively tiny too. I’ve never regretted a choice more than Remix.

Post reply on HN