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Comment by vosper | Hacker News Reader

I enjoyed seeing a side-by-side comparison of some differences between the two systems. It seems to mix tooling support with language features, but I think that's fair, because good tooling is essential. It would be nice to see some more examples, but clearly some effort went into this evaluation.

I'm surprised the author thinks that Flow is more popular amongst the React community than Typescript. I hardly ever hear about Flow, and I work with React and follow it's development. I've been gradually concluding that Typescript has won in terms of future-of-frontend, so I'd be curious to know if people disagree.

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Yeah, the impression that I get is that TS has won as well. Initially it really offered a lot more than Flow, e.g. things like Definitely Typed, and I think that's become a feedback loop (i.e. more people are interested in TS because it already has a bigger community and more to offer, and thus it has as bigger community and more to offer...)

It probably didn't help that it took a long time for flow to be usable on windows.

I'm sure the fact that flow is considered more tired to react while typescript is considered more agnostic helps as well (I've not explored flow so I don't know whether it is tied to react or not but I do think that's the impression).

I don't think Flow is tied to React at all, except that the default create-react-app includes it as an option.

It does have built in type definitions for React, where as all other libraries you probably need to use flow-typed (similar to definitely-typed in TypeScript).

So it does kind of have React integration, but it's pretty loose - you can use it with any other framework, and there's nothing obviously React-specific about the language.

Edit: See https://flow.org/en/docs/react/types/

It's very tied to the react / facebook ecosystem.

Nuclide for atom was the official release by facebook for supporting flow + react, and now you have Atom-IDE which is optimized for react + immutable.js + flow.

Plus the facebook guys are avoiding VScode like the plague and focusing entirely on Atom. Which now also comes with the BSD+ licence.

"Plus the facebook guys are avoiding VScode like the plague" Not true.

> I'm surprised the author thinks that Flow is more popular amongst the React community than Typescript. I hardly ever hear about Flow, and I work with React and follow it's development.

Agreed. Perhaps the thought that Flow is more popular in the React community comes from people who are not using either Flow or TypeScript? In my experience, I rarely ever see Flow being used in the wild.

Another metric we can look at to estimate popularity is the number of questions on StackOverflow.

Flow has 1K https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/flowtype

TypeScript has 37K https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/typescript

Also looking at NPM downloads this month:

Flow has 1M https://www.npmjs.com/package/flow-bin

TypeScript has 7M https://www.npmjs.com/package/typescript

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