Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Items tagged typescript, webassembly

Filters: typescript × webassembly × Sorted by date


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. # 4th May 2024, 2:08 pm

The Dropflow Playground (via) Dropflow is a “CSS layout engine” written in TypeScript and taking advantage of the HarfBuzz text shaping engine (used by Chrome, Android, Firefox and more) compiled to WebAssembly to implement glyph layout.

This linked demo is fascinating: on the left hand side you can edit HTML with inline styles, and the right hand side then updates live to show that content rendered by Dropflow in a canvas element.

Why would you want this? It lets you generate images and PDFs with excellent performance using your existing knowledge HTML and CSS. It’s also just really cool! # 22nd March 2024, 1:33 am

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