Not true, most of that can be done with TypeScript. $Values might be the only one missing.

Are you aware the TypeScript has mapped types and conditional types[1]? The vast majority of Flow's type utils can be implemented in TypeScript, and many of them are included by default[2]. As far as I can tell all of Flow's utility types are compiler built-ins[3], but TypeScript's built-ins are declared using the type system itself (or are just natural parts of the syntax):

  type Keys<T> = keyof T
  type Values<T> = T[keyof T]
  type Readonly_<T> = Readonly<T>
  type Shape<T> = Partial<T>
  type NonMaybeType<T> = NonNullable<T>

  // Exact<T> cannot be implemented because TS doesn't have exact types as a separate concept,
  // It should be noted that object literals are exact by-default if there's a type annotation
  // Issue: https://github.com/Microsoft/TypeScript/issues/12936

  type Diff<A, B> = Pick<A, Exclude<keyof A, keyof B>>
  // Rest<T> should be equal to Diff, because TS doesn't have exact types

  type ElementType<T, K extends keyof T> = T[K]
  // PropertyType in unnecessary, because T[K] works for everything

  // Note that this is variadic - "Args" is an array of arguments
  type Call<F, Args extends any[]> = F extends (...args: Args) => infer B ? B : never

  // This works for both objects and tuples.
  type ObjMap<T, F> = { [K in keyof T]: Call<F, [T[K]]> }

  // I couldn't figure out how to implement Class<T>, but you can access the type of a class instance with
  // typeof ClassName.prototype 

  // $SuperType and $Subtype are not documented, so I can't try to replicate them.

  // TypeScript doesn't have existential types, but you can emulate them within the type system, or avoid them using e.g "infer"
  // Discussion and encoding https://github.com/Microsoft/TypeScript/issues/14466#issuecomment-338045331

I don't agree with your statement about TypeScript's design. Before ES6 TypeScript _was_ quite different from JS, but for the past 3 or 4 years it has followed modern JS very closely. The flavor of JS it supports is fully compliant with ES2018, and the ONLY feature with codegen impact it has in addition to modern JS and JSX are enums - which compile down to simple object literals.

[1] https://www.typescriptlang.org/docs/handbook/advanced-types.... [2] https://github.com/Microsoft/TypeScript-Handbook/blob/master... [3] https://github.com/facebook/flow/blob/cf03c08109014c4503a392...

The last time I used Flow it was intended to be used a daemon constantly watching your code. This made it really difficult to use with tools like Webpack which are built for "atomic" operations like tsc.