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Comment by Sophistifunk | Hacker News Reader

I like and have used them both, but for me there's two points that are massively in favour of TypeScript. The first, is that TS is written in TS, rather than OCaml. The second, is that Microsoft has a long history of developing and more importantly supporting dev tools, and is working on TypeScript for TypeScript's sake. Facebook is (and they're open about this) mainly concerned with Facebook's use-cases, and this drives their OSS products such as React(-native) and Flow.

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> The first, is that TS is written in TS, rather than OCaml

I think being written in OCaml would be a benefit, rather than a negative. One of the reasons I'm interested in ReasonML, which powers Facebook's Flow, is that is based off of Bloomberg's Bucklescript, which is based off of OCaml.

I never knew the power of types (specifically algebraic data types) and the convenience of using them until I discovered them in F# (and Elm).

It's not that I'm against OCaml, I've tried to learn it a few times but the toolchain was a PITA. The benefits of self-hosting is that the more you use TypeScript, the more qualified you become to contribute, to troubleshoot, and to if-necessary help shoulder the burden of maintenance should Facebook/Microsoft decide it's no-longer profitable.

I work on Reason, mentioned above. The goal of Reason is exactly to expose a polished layer over the OCaml toolchain: http://facebook.github.io/reason/

Give it a try! Ping us if you need to: https://github.com/facebook/reason#community

I really like the idea of Reason & the community is pretty nice from my experience. At the same time, installing it on Windows is a huge pain. Windows 10 was feasible. Windows 7 (because Enterprises can't ever upgrade) is really hard to install it in my experience. I understand this has more to do with OCaml on Windows (which is odd since F# is very similar to OCaml). By the way, I should also mention that F# has Fable which compiles F# to JavaScript. It would be great if the Reason & Fable communities worked together if you're not already.

I was under the impression Reason was a library that let you write build files in OCaml? I'm not sure how this helps your average JavaScript programmer make sense of the source to flowtype.

Edit: Never mind, you're referring to my complaint about the OCaml toolchain. Carry on :D

Advancements in Typescript's typing benefit itself.

Plus self-hosting in this case also means that Typescript runs everywhere JS runs, including use cases of compiling Typescript on the fly directly in a browser or very easily including Typescript compilation in NodeJS toolchains or anywhere else JS may run.

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