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Comment by _frog | Hacker News Reader

From my personal experience, Flow prioritises soundness in its type system, and thus can catch some bugs that TS won’t, but the TS tooling and editor support is drastically better than Flow’s.

Edit: oh and it’s worth noting that I’ve had much more luck finding TS definitions for third party packages than I have with Flow.

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Could you expand some more on the tooling/editor support?

I’ve only done a cursory look. My editor (IntelliJ) supports both to some level. Webpack/Babel do too.

I’m very new to writing React and modern front end JS so it’s quite possible there are things that I should be looking out for that I don’t even know about.

Typescript compiler architecture is quite different to flows. Typescript was written from the get go to provide really fast and accurate intellisense to IDEs. The newer refactoring powers are super nice too. Most ides just ask typescripts language service “hey, my user’s cursor is here, what should I show for code completion?”

I think that’s what differentiates TS from flow. Typescript thought about the whole developers workflow while flow is just a compile time typechecker.

To Flow's credit, their language server does provide IDE features:

https://github.com/flowtype/flow-language-server#supported-f...

I still have found TypeScript to be an overall more pleasant developer experience, though.

That’s awesome, I didn’t know that.

At this point, I think Flow clearly has a minority mindshare & is looked at more skeptically all around the JS ecosystem, and maybe even the React ecosystem based on what I see talked around. TS does a much better job integrating with existing JS and is much more practical about incremental updates whereas Flow bleeds all too easily into needing to add typing to a significant amount of code in order to add a type.

That's not to say that either TypeScript or Flow are perfect - they both are constraining with typing when it comes to composing functions last I checked.

I didn't have too many problems with typescript and ramda. I occasionally have to explicitly send in types to the first function of a pipe, which is a little annoying, but for the most part it seems to just work for how I use it. What problems have you run into?

Have a look at the typescript declaration for Node's util.promisify (sorry on mobile can't find it right now). It's something like 10 lines long and covers only a handful of cases.

It's not something you'd want to find in the middle of your code, yet you may have to if you want to do generic/functional programming in TS.

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