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Figma’s Journey to TypeScript

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Re: Figma’s Journey to TypeScript

#161

Post by gregors »

halfmatthalfcat wrote: post #114
hparadiz wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

tsx, esbuild, Bun, Deno, etc...all things that don't require you to use Webpack and just write/run TS...

it's worth pointing out Evan (co-founder of Figma) also created esbuild.

Re: Figma’s Journey to TypeScript

#162

Post by WuxiFingerHold »

hparadiz wrote: post #83
julik wrote: 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.…

That is really unfortunate. Webpack is a nightmare and outdated. I wonder how you came to use it? Node has a nice intro: https://nodejs.org/en/learn/getting-started/nodejs-with-type... (skip ts-node and go directly to tsx). Or Deno or Bun run your TS code directly. Modern frontend frameworks like Vue or Svelte have their own tooling, mostly based on Vite and Esbuild. I think it was just bad luck that you came across Webpack ...

Re: Figma’s Journey to TypeScript

#163

Post by zellyn »

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.

The 2x speed difference was the most surprising part of the whole article to me!

I wonder if it’s possible to limit one’s use of typescript to just the subset that gives that same performance…

Re: Figma’s Journey to TypeScript

#164

Post by reasonableklout »

Hey, I worked on this project! Wrote a bit more on Twitter here: https://twitter.com/andrew_k_chan/status/1786769203912925477

The title of the post is misleading because we used Typescript at Figma for nearly a decade in other parts of the codebase, and there was more Typescript than Skew for almost that entire time. As the blog post explains, Skew was used in our mobile engine (and eventually for our prototyping player, mirroring feature, and maybe one or two other product surfaces I'm forgetting).

Re: Figma’s Journey to TypeScript

#165

Post by dml2135 »

haolez wrote: post #156
mindfulmark wrote: post #60

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…

It's not that it's bad. But sometimes the project and the team are not that big that its qualities matter. And you lose a little bit of readibility with type-intensive code. And nicely written TypeScript looks awesome, but badly written TypeScript can be a huge mess, as it can with any language, but TypeScript purists sometimes forget that the language is just a part of a nicely written and designed system.

I would describe typed code as more readable, not less. I take “readability” to mean ease of understanding, not how much my code sounds like written english. Not knowing what the type of something is makes understanding harder.

Re: Figma’s Journey to TypeScript

#167

Post by quest88 »

WuxiFingerHold wrote: post #162
hparadiz wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

That is really unfortunate. Webpack is a nightmare and outdated. I wonder how you came to use it? Node has a nice intro: https://nodejs.org/en/learn/getting-started/nodejs-with-type... (skip ts-node and go directly to tsx). Or Deno or Bun run your TS code directly. Modern frontend frameworks like Vue or Svelte have their own tooling, mostly based on Vite and Esbuild. I think it was just bad luck that you came across…

I know you're trying to help, but this further highlights the problem with frontend dev.

Re: Figma’s Journey to TypeScript

#168

Post by chuckadams »

incrudible wrote: post #104
cageface wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Never start with Webpack. Use Vite with a template and go from there.

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.

The request-per-module thing only happens with the Vite dev server: production builds are bundled with rollup similar to webpack.

Re: Figma’s Journey to TypeScript

#169

Post by chuckadams »

hparadiz wrote: post #86
59nadir wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

People hate php for no reason. They talk about performance or whatever while building rest crud apps. Literally any language can handle that easily and your bottleneck is usually the database. I've scaled startups on PHP to hundreds of thousands of users running on a few cheap ec2 instances. But no one wants to build new php projects instead focusing on Go, Python, or Ruby. I honestly don't get it. PHP devs earn less…

I’ve written PHP off and on since the .php3 extension was a thing. People had very good reasons to hate PHP then. It’s greatly improved, but largely due to the composer ecosystem helping to paper over the worse bits. The global functions are still an awful mess.

Re: Figma’s Journey to TypeScript

#170

Post by CharlesW »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #107
incrudible wrote: post #104

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.

> Remix. Vite done right…

Remix is moving to Vite as its default compiler. https://remix.run/docs/en/main/guides/vite

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