Figma plugins & asynchronous updates

Utopia has two Figma plugins: Fluid type & space calculator and Batch update text styles. Hopefully their names describe what they do.

They’ve both been updated to the latest Figma specs, to support a feature they’re calling “Dynamic Page Loading”. The update process was pretty seamless, and very well documented. It predominantly involved migrating a number of functions from synchronous versions over to asynchronous counterparts.

However, running the type & space calculator in this new mode (before making any suggested changes) immediately threw up a bunch of issues. I sighed dramatically, then dug into what was going on. And lots of them! Race conditions! (sorry, the world always needs n+1 race condition jokes).

Where previously, a lot of the asynchronous issues in my code had been papered over by eager pre-loading, this new update shone an honest light on them. It made me realise just how fortunate we are to have great async/await support these days. It makes it effortless to split work into parallel chunks, or intentionally run things in non-blocking series. A train journey later and all the issues have been fixed.

If you do spot anything untoward with the plugins, do let me know!