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Comment by KurtMueller | Hacker News Reader

> 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).

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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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