Are tools like Flow or writing in TypeScript worth it? Time will tell!

Initial impressions are that the extra thought and care results in a longer initial development time, but the extra confidence in your code is worth it!

Typescript vs Flow

  • Typescript has more tooling and IDE support, more popular
  • Flow has less tooling and IDE support, but still backed by FB
  • Typescript requires more formal annotations of types
  • Flow has more emphasis on flexible type inference, more “normal” JS
  • Typescript adds features to the language that transpile
  • Flow is more vanilla JS, without adding or changing anything.
  • Typescript is hard to integrate into React and Redux
  • Flow is specifically built for React

Pitfalls

Semantic versioning on @types no longer applies – it is basically impossible to not change the API when changing @types, so even a “bugfix” can become backwards incompatible.

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