Figma’s journey to TypeScript
published on 2024/05/04
Skew began as a side project in the early days of Figma. At the time, Skew fulfilled a critical need at Figma: to build out our prototype viewer with support on both the web and mobile. What started as a way to quickly spin this up became an entire compile-to-JavaScript programming language that enabled more advanced optimizations and faster compile times. But as we accumulated more and more code in Skew in the prototype viewer over the years, we slowly realized that it was difficult for new hires to ramp up on, couldn’t easily integrate with the rest of our codebase, and was missing a developer ecosystem outside of Figma. The pain of scaling it grew to outweigh its original advantages.