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by praveenperera 1708 days ago
> 3. The most impressive part about esbuild development is not just that it's one guy writing it: it is the level of support and documentation he manages to provide alongside.

And the one guy writing it is Evan Wallace, co-founder and CTO of Figma. I don't know how he has the time!

5 comments

Figma's tech is mindblowing. Their entire engine is custom-built in C++ : https://www.figma.com/blog/building-a-professional-design-to...

> Instead of attempting to get one of [HTML/SVG/JS Canvas] to work, we implemented everything from scratch using WebGL. Our renderer is a highly-optimized tile-based engine with support for masking, blurring, dithered gradients, blend modes, nested layer opacity, and more. All rendering is done on the GPU and is fully anti-aliased. Internally our code looks a lot like a browser inside a browser; we have our own DOM, our own compositor, our own text layout engine, and we’re thinking about adding a render tree just like the one browsers use to render HTML.

To most people, esbuild would be a full-time job. Based on the above, it seems that to Evan it's a fraction of the work he did in Figma's early days all at once!

He seems to like writing code
Ironically, the Figma tagline is "Nothing great is made alone"
What in the world? And some say 10x engineers don’t exist…
I guess build times were a real issue for Figma and it started as an internal project.
This seems like a pet project. Reason I say that is if it was built for work, it would likely be from figma. Instead this project is from Evan himself.
I'm not so sure about that as you. Not all companies are like Google and "steal" the credit of work done by employees, even if done on work time but unrelated to the core business. Plenty of companies let employees work on open source and still remain the owners of the software produced.
Massively impressive!