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Typescript vs. Flow
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typescript-vs-flow.md

Flow vs. Typescript

Flow

Built by Facebook

Stats for past month: 0 merged PRs, 30 Proposed PRs, 50 closed issues, 135 new issues, SO Questions ~0.9k

Used by: Facebook...

Created: 2014

PROS

  • 👍 Built by Facebook, just like React – in practice, this doesn’t seem to provide a marked advantage for flow
  • 👍 Babel integration
  • 👍 No real learning curve
  • 👍 Inference of types
  • 👍 support for JSX

CONS

  • 👎 No “out-of-the-box” integration with any editor
  • 👎 Poor error messaging
  • 👎 Poor tooling (Getting Flow to run is not easy)
  • 👎 bug with JSX spread operator ( <Component {...props} /> )
  • 👎 Does it detect unused vars? “No. Use a linter.” -A Flow developer response :(
  • 👎 non-native watch mode
  • 👎 .js files could be flow, could be normal JS – not obvious at a glance

MEHs

  • 👍 /👎 Flow is highly interested in creating a provably correct type system
  • 👍 /👎 ~400 typed third-party libraries

Typescript

Built by Microsoft

Stats for past month: 215 merged PRs, 46 Proposed PRs, 440 closed issues, 215 new issues, SO Questions ~38k

Used by: Lyft, Microsoft, Google, Asana

Created: 2012

PROS

  • 👍 Out-of-the-box, first class VSCode integration
  • 👍 Easier to setup
  • 👍 Used by default in Angular2
  • 👍 Helpful error messaging
  • 👍 .ts files easy to distinguish between .js files
  • 👍 (as of 2.3) ability to type-check non-TS files with --checkJs
  • 👍 support for JSX
  • 👍 Babel integration
  • 👍 Native watch-mode (file specific)
  • 👍👍👍 ~3,000 third-party libraries

CONS

  • 👎 Possible increased language complexity --> learning curve
  • 👎 In my experience there are frequent breaking changes from version to version (not sure if this is still a problem)

MEHs

  • 👍/👎 More frequent releases, this can introduce breaking changes
  • 👍/👎 Typescript is not interested in creating a “provably correct” type system – instead tries to strike balance between correctness and productivity

Links

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