Figma’s journey to TypeScript: Compiling away our custom programming language (via) I love a good migration story. Figma had their own custom language that compiled to JavaScript, called Skew. As WebAssembly support in browsers emerged and improved the need for Skew’s performance optimizations reduced, and TypeScript’s maturity and popularity convinced them to switch.
Rather than doing a stop-the-world rewrite they built a transpiler from Skew to TypeScript, enabling a multi-year migration without preventing their product teams from continuing to make progress on new features.
Recent articles
- Reverse engineering some updates to Claude - 31st July 2025
- Trying out Qwen3 Coder Flash using LM Studio and Open WebUI and LLM - 31st July 2025
- My 2.5 year old laptop can write Space Invaders in JavaScript now, using GLM-4.5 Air and MLX - 29th July 2025