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If TypeScript is so great, how come all notable ReactJS projects use Babel?

discuss.reactjs.org

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Re: If TypeScript is so great, how come all notable ReactJS projects use Babel?

#21

Post by scrollaway »

RyanCavanaugh wrote: post #14

Speaking as the person who implemented JSX support for TypeScript, I question the premise! JSX support (and implementation of React semantics for typechecking that JSX) was a very popular feature request. I can tell you just from how quickly people notice when something JSX-related changes in the nightly build that there are a lot of people using TypeScript with React. Also, since this seem to be a popular misconcept…

I'd like to offtopicly chime in and thank you :)

Javascript is a language and an ecosystem I really disliked until React and TypeScript came around and changed everything. We're making extensive use of JSX in our React app (https://github.com/hearthsim/joust / https://hsreplay.net/replay/ZXKe5VoqTzknRJNcPdTnYa) and it's really wonderful to both read and write.

Re: If TypeScript is so great, how come all notable ReactJS projects use Babel?

#22

Post by patates »

RyanCavanaugh wrote: post #19
patates wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My opinion is that all the extensions on JavaScript should be implemented as Babel plugins, including Typescript. That would solve all the compatibility problems. Well, when Babel first came out I also thought that it should have been a Sweet.js plugin so maybe I don't have the best understanding of this "transpiling" circus.

It's tempting to think this way, but it's a performance/complexity nightmare. If everything is a plugin, then you need ways for different parsers to talk to each other to deal with nested syntax, plus ways for different syntactic transformers to correctly handle nesting of certain things. For example, if you desired to implement a plugin for "thin arrows", and a plugin for JSX, how would you parse this? const x = } /…

Well, this is not the first time that a comment on HN not only made me change my opinion but also taught me something. Thank you for the detailed answer.

Maybe the specific example you give can be solved in a very hacky way with something like a priority system but I can see how messy it can get even when tokenizing the possible expressions for such an open "playground", let alone transforming in the correct sequence.

Thank you, Ryan.

edit: Oh you are the person who implemented JSX support for Typescript! How do we buy you a beer, or in this case a six-pack?

Re: If TypeScript is so great, how come all notable ReactJS projects use Babel?

#23

Post by amelius »

cprecioso wrote: post #4
amelius wrote: post #3

OT: is it me or is Babel incredibly slow in translating ES6 to regular JS?

It is. Try enabling the `compact` option or using something like Buble [1]. [1]: https://buble.surge.sh

Interesting. Is Buble compatible with Babel? I.e., can you call functions in Babel-compiled code from Buble-compiled code, and vice versa?

Re: If TypeScript is so great, how come all notable ReactJS projects use Babel?

#24

Post by afarrell »

RyanCavanaugh wrote: post #14

Speaking as the person who implemented JSX support for TypeScript, I question the premise! JSX support (and implementation of React semantics for typechecking that JSX) was a very popular feature request. I can tell you just from how quickly people notice when something JSX-related changes in the nightly build that there are a lot of people using TypeScript with React. Also, since this seem to be a popular misconcept…

> It would only increase the concept count in an educational setting where you want to only show the thing you're trying to explain.

As someone who has written a long tutorial, this makes total sense. When I was first looking at the react ecosystem, it was very frustrating because of the high cost of picking pieces to work together. I really liked http://teropa.info/blog/2015/09/10/full-stack-redux-tutorial... because it showed how to use mocha in the context of we webpack and react and redux.

It would be nice to see more tutorials for curated toolchains, but they take a lot of work.

Re: If TypeScript is so great, how come all notable ReactJS projects use Babel?

#25

Post by gotofritz »

mhd wrote: post #7

Because a lot of notable ReactJS projects are irritatingly enamored with all the latest ES6/ES7/ESCloudCuckooLand features, not all of which are supported by TypeScript. I've noticed this a lot in the Redux realm. For every possible problem there seems to be a solution that harnesses one particular new/proposed bell & whistle.

In other words, "things I don't use = cuckooland"

Re: If TypeScript is so great, how come all notable ReactJS projects use Babel?

#26

Post by nol13 »

baq wrote: post #5
NhanH wrote: post #2

From personal experience, you probably want Babel anyway even with TS to deal with some weird edge cases. I think this has been fixed now. But a couple of weeks ago, I had a case where TS compiler output has to be ES6 (since the code base were using something like constructor.name which isn't in ES5), but then Jest (the test framework) doesn't like ES6 syntax, so Babel is needed to compile whatever Jest didn't like d…

webassembly can't come soon enough. as a developer who doesn't deal with browser frontends what i read in this thread is madness. (3 comments at the time of writing this...)

it's like they don't even realize how ridiculous this shit sounds..

Re: If TypeScript is so great, how come all notable ReactJS projects use Babel?

#28

Post by spankalee »

baq wrote: post #5
NhanH wrote: post #2

From personal experience, you probably want Babel anyway even with TS to deal with some weird edge cases. I think this has been fixed now. But a couple of weeks ago, I had a case where TS compiler output has to be ES6 (since the code base were using something like constructor.name which isn't in ES5), but then Jest (the test framework) doesn't like ES6 syntax, so Babel is needed to compile whatever Jest didn't like d…

webassembly can't come soon enough. as a developer who doesn't deal with browser frontends what i read in this thread is madness. (3 comments at the time of writing this...)

WASM doesn't have DOM access or GC. It's not the answer.

Re: If TypeScript is so great, how come all notable ReactJS projects use Babel?

#29

Post by hokkos »

I don't feel the posts answer the question, they are more ads to Typescript or Flow. Unsurprisingly the people who answer are the one who use TS or Flow.

So I tried a little to convert a big React project to Flow or Typescript. The Flow was a non-starter because of the absence of Windows support at the time, and we use like 40 (non dev) dependencies, and Typescript has a way better support for typings, I tried Flow on a mac it was chocking on the size of the node_modules or couldn't find the app modules because we use a webpack root dir (i don't tried hard to make it work).

When the app was started Typescript didn't support React so it wasn't written in a "static" way, and accumulated a lot of dynamic idioms, also the backbone of the app is a dynamically generated schema based on XSD and that would be hard to make it compatible with TS type system, also React ecosystem doesn't really use it, leading to a chicken/egg problem, and React.PropTypes is already a form of type checking (but dynamic) so it probably lessen the feeling of a need of static typing in React ecosystem.

Re: If TypeScript is so great, how come all notable ReactJS projects use Babel?

#30

Post by z3t4 »

I do not believe compilation nor a type system belong in JavaScript. It's better to have something like "Flow" that does static analysis of the code as you write.

I might even go as far as putting on a "tin foil hat" and state that Typescript is a trick to lock you into their proprietary ecosystem of expensive tools that everyone have to buy into just to communicate with you once you are locked in.

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