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Comment by ggregoire | Hacker News Reader

It's kind of crazy that Facebook has let TypeScript takes so much market share.

I've been using Flow for so long now. The techno is good, the integration with the code editors is good too, but Flow has a lot of small-but-really-annoying bugs (2235 issues on GitHub right now), the type definitions for third-party libs are meh (you often have to update/fix the definitions by yourself), the team seems extraordinarily unstaffed for such an important project, they don't share the roadmap at all, the priorities are clearly internal first (like improving the performances instead of fixing the bugs) and they don't seem to do much marketing or communication about it.

I wonder what's the future of Flow at this point.

And I'm seriously thinking to move to TS (for pro and personal projects) once create-react-app will work perfectly out-of-the-box with TS.

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I tried Flow and TypeScript for the first time a few months ago. Flow is absolutely abandoned and dying. TypeScript is taking over where Flow left off, and is far ahead of the game by now. I use TypeScript with create-react-app in my client work and it is invaluable and a wonderful experience, with no downsides as far as I can see.

Once I heard about ReasonML I figured that was the end of Flow.

And re: create-react-app, have you tried react-scripts-ts? I've been using it all year with no real issues.

Honestly they're not even close. TS has been eating Flow's lunch pretty much all year. It won't be long now.

Interesting. I was considering Flow and was going to begin using it by sprinkling it in using their Comment Types[1]. I wanted something that I could use but also make it optional for the other devs. Only because I was just wanted to test it out and not fully commit to making the team use it right away.

[1] https://flow.org/en/docs/types/comments/

I'd love to still recommend Flow, and as I said the techno is good and does the job, and they continue to release new versions, but I just don't see what benefits you would get by choosing Flow over TS at this point. Flow and TS do exactly the same job, with almost the same syntax (with different ways to transform it in JS tho), but TS has a bigger community and MS seems to put more efforts/resources into it. This has been true for 1 or 2 years now, so…

Typescript also supports comment typing via JSDoc. I write complex types in a definition file and use them in JSDoc. Works great. https://github.com/Microsoft/TypeScript/wiki/JSDoc-support-i...

Hold on, TS can typecheck your code just by using your jsdoc annotations?! That's a game changer for me!

Yes and it works quite well. Sometimes JSDoc fails to provide enough info about the types though.

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