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Comment by erikrothoff | Hacker News Reader

I like and use Ember a lot, but the one gripe I have is that Handlebars uses s-expressions instead of just inline JS. The constant context switch is massive and it’s not possible to hook into Typescript types, and I doubt it ever will.

Would love the possibility to enable a flag to just enable JS-in HBS like

  {{#if this.model.isEnabled(this.byOtherVariable}}
    {{aHelperCall(this.args.thing)}}
  {{/if}}

Kinda like a hybrid of JSX and HBS, but combining the best of both worlds.

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> it’s not possible to hook into Typescript types, and I doubt it ever will

While it's not possible today, it's definitely possible in principle. (Vue is a great example of this!)

The folks working on TS integration in Ember (of whom I am one) are very well aware both of the problem, what it will take to solve it, and what the state of the art is elsewhere. No timelines, but we're working on it and when we're done the experience should be comparable to TSX. All of us working on it think TSX is a killer bit of DX and it absolutely is a thing we're aiming to match.

This is amazing

Really cool, didn't know Vue had this. It's great that it's in the works, and I'm really really looking forward to it. Will it be statically typed s-expression or more like regular JS? I spoke a bit to pzuraq about this on Reddit and it seems to be still s-expressions going forward?

What we're aiming for at this point is 100% TS support for the current Glimmer syntax—we expressly want to support Ember and Glimmer usage as they are today. If Glimmer/Ember itself were to move toward supporting something more like the way Svelte's templates work (which is closer to what we could support while maintaining the tradeoffs Glimmer makes relative to JSX), we'd of course move to support that as well, but there's nothing like that planned at the moment.

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