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Comment by nindalf | Hacker News Reader

If Figma has their eyes open, they'll run with this idea. Design once in Figma, generate UIs for React, Vue, Jetpack and SwiftUI. Designers become way more productive, doing part of the work of front end devs.

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That can't happen. When a tool like this gets complicated enough to fully specify a complex problem it becomes unusable by the semi-technical people it was made for. Best Figma knows their strength and stays with it, leaving the extensions to other companies so as to compartmentalize the difficulty.

Developers aren't just people who know a programming language, they're people who can examine a problem in detail. If a designer was capable of this they'd be a dev who designed and they probably wouldn't use a GUI web design tool.

And from my experience Figma conversion exports are massive. Did a site last year and it spit out 12mb. Nice in terms of turnaround, but not in terms of performance.

I'm curious... 12mb of what? Was it HTML, CSS or JS that increased the size?

All around. HTML was massive nested div soup, CSS was a mess and every item had it's own styling, JS for these page position trackers and other mess where an entire library is added for only a few lines of js.

Rapid prototyping is still a great thing... getting something from figma to usable regardless of filesize is still a good thing.

Figma is the new dreamweaver?

The /idea/ of going from a design tool to working app is obvious. It's figuring out a way to do it that works which is hard.

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