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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?

#71

Post by oblio »

apaprocki wrote: post #62

Anecdotally, at Bloomberg we're in the middle of ramping up TypeScript support in our core server-side stack. Our custom IDE is Windows based, so it was very straightforward to integrate the tserver into the workflow to give developers the choice of writing vanilla JS or TS with additional annotations we send down to the IDE for the core stack. We have the largest single collection of JS I'm aware of and we're eager…

That sounds really interesting. Could you give more details about your adoption plan? Which version of TS are you using? Are you planning to migrate to TS 2.0, when it comes out? In your experience so far, have the conversion done until now caught any bugs?

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

#72

Post by dangoor »

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.

As far as I've seen, it's really only Object spread (likely ES2017 feature) that's commonly used that is not yet supported by TypeScript. Microsoft has promised support for it in TS 2.1, and generally stays on top of ECMAScript proposals that have gained enough traction that they seem likely to ship.

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

#73

Post by oblio »

d0100 wrote: post #47
z3t4 wrote: post #30

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.

True, VS Code is so damn expensive!

And so proprietary! :)

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

#74

Post by apaprocki »

jonursenbach wrote: post #70
apaprocki wrote: post #62

Anecdotally, at Bloomberg we're in the middle of ramping up TypeScript support in our core server-side stack. Our custom IDE is Windows based, so it was very straightforward to integrate the tserver into the workflow to give developers the choice of writing vanilla JS or TS with additional annotations we send down to the IDE for the core stack. We have the largest single collection of JS I'm aware of and we're eager…

Curious, but why do you guys have a custom IDE?

We started using server-side JS around 2005 so things were a bit different back then. The main driving force for it was that we had to have WYSIWYG integration with the product and the only way we could achieve that was by embedding an HWND from the running product to ensure it wasn't some faked runtime that would behave slightly differently during development / in production.

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

#75

Post by dangoor »

rubber_duck wrote: post #8

TypeScript is a PITA when working with typed immutable records, I don't think there will be a happy solution to that. React stack encourages stuff like immutable.js. In general TS React feels bolted on rather than designed with TS in mind like Angular 2. I love TS and using ng2 at work. If I was using React I would probably also skip on TS.

There was a comment on the original thread linked here about TS 2.1 likely getting support for "partial objects" that will help with both Redux and Immutable Records.

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

#76

Post by pygy_ »

Edit: Misleading charts, figures and conclusions ahead, see @nathancahill's reply

https://npm-stat.com/charts.html?package=babel&package=types...

Babel has faltered since the V6 release, TypeScript is still growing fast, so I'd expect the React world to follow suite, even if Facebook itself pushes Flow...

NPM downloads in August (rounded):

    typescript: 2,000,000

    babel:        620,000 (down from 890,000 in November 2015)

    flow-bin:     120,000

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

#77

Post by apaprocki »

oblio wrote: post #71
apaprocki wrote: post #62

Anecdotally, at Bloomberg we're in the middle of ramping up TypeScript support in our core server-side stack. Our custom IDE is Windows based, so it was very straightforward to integrate the tserver into the workflow to give developers the choice of writing vanilla JS or TS with additional annotations we send down to the IDE for the core stack. We have the largest single collection of JS I'm aware of and we're eager…

That sounds really interesting. Could you give more details about your adoption plan? Which version of TS are you using? Are you planning to migrate to TS 2.0, when it comes out? In your experience so far, have the conversion done until now caught any bugs?

If I'm remembering correctly it first went live to some early adopters with 1.6.1 and it is using 1.8 now. We obviously want to track the latest releases as fast as we can because they bring new features we're interested in.

I would need to ask some of the teams that tried converting larger projects specifically what they found that they felt was important. I'm certain TS would find some bugs in any sufficiently large project, but I'd have to go dig up data to know roughly how many or how serious they were. Just because there was a technical quality issue with the code doesn't mean that the vanilla JS version of it wasn't producing the actual desired result. It's hard to gather numbers for that type of thing. It's very similar to the let-down a lot of people feel with using static analyzers on mature, battle-tested C++ code for the first time. It will certainly find some nits, but most likely they were not that important to begin with.

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

#78

Post by markdog12 »

kelvin0 wrote: post #61
markdog12 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Happy Dart programmer here. Great, easy to learn, productive language that runs on browser, server, mobile. I have no idea why Dart isn't used more.

I want to give Dart a chance, because most of it's features seem quite appealing. I decided to start learning JS/Jquery and then move onto to Dart. The fact that everything comes bundled into Dart as a whole dev environment (IDE, compiling,packaging,) and the interoperability with JS make it quite attractive. What is your experience doing web dev with and without Dart (JS vs Dart, pros and cons)? I'd be really intere…

I started off with C/C++, Java, then AS3 writing Flash games. Then js/jquery and I instantly hated it (js). There were just too many quirks, bizarre, unexpected behavior. Sure, I could learn it inside out and avoid these pitfalls, but why would I when there were better alternatives?

I did use CoffeeScript after that, a beautiful little language, but only suitable for smallish projects. I need static typing for large projects.

After that, I learned Dart, and coming from C/C++, Java, AS3, it was a breeze. I find there are no quirks, everything behaves as you'd expect. Other team members were productive in Dart in about a week, without having seen a line of Dart code.

I mostly write HTML5 games and server-side with Dart, so I can't really talk too much about any client-side frameworks.

As for Dart cons, I guess one would be you have to use a different browser for web dev, but it's not really a big deal, I'm kinda reaching here. There aren't as many 3rd party libraries as some other languages. Depending on what you want, you might have to get your hands dirty and issue some pull requests for features/bug fixes for those libs. JS interop can still be a bit tricky too, depending on what you're doing.

Any specific questions, I'd be happy to answer. Also, there's a great slack channel for Dart: https://dartlang-slack.herokuapp.com/

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

#79

Post by Touche »

tkubacki wrote: post #39

I was always wondering why HN crowd is ok with TS and so prejudiced against Dart - Dart has NG2, await async in older browsers and good tooling (webstorm, vscode) and much saner package system. When doing lot of small web apps - it's easier to mantain.

I can't find in the documentation, does the `pub build` tool do code splitting? I can't use a language without this.

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

#80

Post by gsnedders »

markdog12 wrote: post #59
gsnedders wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least in my view, there's a couple of big things: Dart doesn't introduce that many advantages over JS for all of its differences, and TS introduces many of them with a smaller diff; there's also the presentation of it—Dart was originally presented as a wholesale replacement of Dart, to ship in all browsers, the language more or less as a fait accompli, which rubs plenty of people the wrong way.

> Dart doesn't introduce that many advantages over JS for all of its differences As someone with experience in both languages, I could not disagree more. > Dart was originally presented as a wholesale replacement of Dart I think you meant replacement of JS here. I guess it depends entirely on what you think of JS as a language. I, for one, would rather a language that fixes core issues with JS, instead of just being…

> I think you meant replacement of JS here. I guess it depends entirely on what you think of JS as a language. I, for one, would rather a language that fixes core issues with JS, instead of just being a superset of JS.

If I were aiming to replace JS, I'd fix what Dart does, but I wouldn't stop with merely fixing what Dart does.

Dart, despite being an entirely new language, has a less expressive type system than TS. It's transpiler (and it's VM) also does no optimisation based on the type system, instead heavily relying on the JIT to infer what the types already imply (e.g., it would be nice to do things like LICM at compile-time).

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