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Figma’s Journey to TypeScript

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Re: Figma’s Journey to TypeScript

#251

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

julik wrote: post #63
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 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.…

I remember when I first read this blog post, https://www.figma.com/blog/how-we-built-the-figma-plugin-sys.... Besides now feeling a bit old realizing this was 5 years ago, I remember thinking what an amazing engineering culture they must have at Figma (besides having a bunch of brilliant people). I mean, they talked about essentially trying out a tech path for a month and then deciding that path was a dead end - I find this so rare in startups where there is a lot of pressure to continually demonstrate "progress".

As a corollary, though, I think those kinds of cultures are only possible if your team is composed of primarily brilliant people, because these brilliant people can move faster than most competitors even if they do wander down an unproductive path for a while, and there is total trust that the folks on your team are capable and self-motivated.

Re: Figma’s Journey to TypeScript

#252

Post by dang »

jack_riminton wrote: post #74
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…

[flagged]

Please don't cross into personal attack, no matter how wrong someone is or you feel they are.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Figma’s Journey to TypeScript

#254

Post by p_l »

dfgdfg34545456 wrote: post #19
dvrp wrote: 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.

Unix and C were pet projects until they enabled secretaries to better write patent proposals.

Re: Figma’s Journey to TypeScript

#255

Post by sporkland »

sakex wrote: post #124
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…

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

They run k8s on borg. From what I can tell as someone that worked a lot on early k8s and a large GCP customer they still use borg mostly internally. k8s is their path to creating cloud portability and neutralizing AWS "network" effects.

Re: Figma’s Journey to TypeScript

#256

Post by phyrex »

makeitdouble wrote: post #232
phyrex wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think there’s any vanilla php in use at meta

Don't know if it's vanilla, but there seems to be some: https://medium.com/@aarthimanikandan2006/does-facebook-still...

That’s just some guy that asserts stuff though. I mean, so am I to you, but fwiw I’ve never seen or heard of any non-hack PHP in the current codebase

Re: Figma’s Journey to TypeScript

#257

Post by pquki4 »

some_furry wrote: post #244
pquki4 wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The w3techs number is often quoted, but it has never been validated by anybody else, and its methodology is very questionable if not flat out wrong.

I'm not one to make perfect the enemy of good. If it's the best we have, it's what I will cite until better is provided.

My opinion is that there isn't anybody else providing the numbers because it's impossible to get a correct number. Suppose Google homepage runs PHP, google.com/a uses Go, google.com/b uses Django, netflix.com use a custom framework running on Node.js, and facebook.com uses an unknown framework. W3 will happily tell you that the entire google.com is powered by php, fail to attribute netflix to JavaScript, and won't count facebook.com at all. That's exactly what's happening with their methodology. They only attribute each website at most once and rely on decade old hints from headers and error pages that are often non existent on newer/in-house web frameworks these days.

Want a real example? Everybody knows that Instagram runs Python. But https://w3techs.com/sites/info/instagram.com can't tell which server side language it runs. There you have it.

I would not use the number unless it can be validated, rather than use it simply because it's "the best we have". No, it's not even remotely good.

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